Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan’s search for the truth during the early days of the pandemic was seen as a threat by the authorities

Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan’s search for the truth during the early days of the pandemic was seen as a threat by the authorities

A Chinese citizen journalist who has been in prison for four years after reporting on the early days of the Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan is due to be released on Monday.

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to document the Chinese government’s response to what became the start of a global pandemic. She shared her reports on X (then known as Twitter), YouTube and WeChat. She was one of the few independent Chinese reporters on the ground as Wuhan and the rest of China went into lockdown.

In one video, recorded in February 2020, Zhang said: “I can’t find anything to say except that the city is paralysed because everything is under cover. That’s what this country is facing now … They imprison us in the name of pandemic prevention and restrict our freedom. We must not talk to strangers, it’s dangerous. So without the truth, everything is meaningless. If we cannot get to the truth, if we cannot break the monopoly of the truth, the world means nothing to us.”

In another video, she showed a hospital that was overflowing with patients on trolleys in the hallway.

  • @boyiEnglish
    40•8 months ago

    And don’t forget the tragic ending suffered by the Dr (can’t remember his name) that first brought out the covid issue, and his phone messages were leaked to the public if I am not mistaken. He was left dead with no proper care by the authority.

    • @baseless_discourse@mander.xyzEnglish
      11•8 months ago

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

      I don’t think he isn’t properly treated, at least according to wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Illness_and_death

      There is a bench in New York central park dedicated to him: https://www.westsiderag.com/2023/02/07/central-park-bench-and-gathering-honor-covid-19-whistleblower . If you are near the central park, you can stop by to pay tribute to him.

      • @boyiEnglish
        4•8 months ago

        Yeah, it could be. May be the sentiment during that time made me think otherwise.

        Anyway to quote NYT,

        We found no evidence his medical care was compromised. But these documents, along with Dr. B’s account and experts’ analysis, reveal important new details about his illness and treatment.

        and…

        The experts said that based on the records, the treatment Dr. Li received, in general, followed the norms of that time for managing the symptoms of coronavirus patients

        bur…

        By the morning of Feb. 6, doctors wrote in the progress notes that Dr. Li was at risk of multiple organ failure. Several physicians we spoke to said that Dr. Li’s condition was so serious that his medical team should have at this point, or before it, considered intubating him and placed him on a ventilator — a higher level of oxygen support.

        The records indicate that Dr. Li had earlier been given oxygen through a nasal tube and then an additional oxygen mask. His medical team also tried to use a noninvasive ventilator on Jan. 19, but wrote that “the patient could not tolerate.”

        It is unclear why Dr. Li was not intubated. Some doctors are more reluctant to intubate young patients; sometimes the patients themselves refuse it. To this day, there is no consensus on when invasive ventilators should be used on Covid-19 patients.

        and…

        According to Dr. B, who arrived at Dr. Li’s intensive care ward around 9 p.m., about two hours after Dr. Li entered cardiac arrest, the hospital’s leadership pushed the medical team to use ECMO because it wanted to show the public that no effort had been spared.

        But several doctors in the room argued that by that point it was too late for it to have been of any use, an assessment that six physicians we talked to agreed with. Dr. B also said putting Dr. Li on ECMO, given its invasive nature, would have been an “insult to his body.”

        • @baseless_discourse@mander.xyzEnglish
          5•8 months ago

          Yeah, the final ECMO was indeed controversial in Chinese community. Other than that, I have not heard any indication of mistreatment.

          Given his high social status, and he said “一个健康的社会不该只有一种声音” (a healthy society shouldn’t only have only one voice), some people suspect CCP likely wanted him dead. But so far, I am not aware of any evidence that his death is man-made.

      • @Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        -3•8 months ago

        By early June 2020, five other doctors had died from COVID-19 in the Wuhan hospital, now called “whistleblower hospital”.

        Was there a huge amount of doctors sick or did these guys just get disappeared?

        • @jonne@infosec.pubEnglish
          9•8 months ago

          COVID was killing a lot of medical personnel initially because they weren’t using the right PPE and got infected with a large initial viral load.

          • @theareciboincident@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            4•8 months ago

            How quickly people forget how major metro hospitals in the US had rows of refrigerated semi trailers because there were too many bodies

            How doctors and nurses were told to wash and reuse their N95s despite it being proven to compromise their effectiveness because supplies were so low

            I hope this bird flu shit blows up even worse, maybe then these dumbasses will get the message

            • @jonne@infosec.pubEnglish
              6•8 months ago

              They’ll never learn. They told us to bang pots and pans for them, and now a few years later they’re still underpaid and overworked the world over. Same goes for every other ‘essential worker’.

            • ✺roguetrick✺English
              -5•8 months ago

              Oh I never washed mine. Just kept it in a plastic bag and wore it till the straps broke.

              Edit: downvotes make me laugh. For context, I was a pre vaccine nurse on a COVID unit for the duration of the pandemic. Never did catch it though from the hospital.

              Also wore a plastic face shield that I washed every time I left the room with bleach. Thankfully COVID is droplet spread so that’s plenty ppe. I wouldn’t have wanted to wear that N95 in a TB room though.

          • @Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldEnglish
            -5•8 months ago

            But the majority of deaths were always old people.

            Younger people got damaged lungs but dying was a rarity.

        • @cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3•8 months ago

          Early in the pandemic the rate of death was much higher than it is now. That’s because nobody had immunity and we didn’t know how to treat people with covid. Doctors treating the initial outbreak were also probably exposed to a large dose of virus all at once making their survival less likely.

      • @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
        -10•8 months ago

        Wikipedia isn’t really a good source for anything ever. If you’re going to cite wikipedia then just grab the wikipedia’s source from the bottom of the page.