A Chinese documentary about COVID-19 in Wuhan

A six-part documentary同心抗“疫”, loosely translated as “Fighting the pandemic together”, premiered on Chinese CCTV1 from Sept 2 to 7.  It is about how China fought the COVID-19 outbreak, mostly in Wuhan, and each episode is about 50 min long with a separate focus.  Episode 1 is on the government/policy level.  Episode 2 is medical/hospital response.  Episode 3 is the Wuhan local community level.  Episode 4 is how the rest of China supported Wuhan and Hubei.  Episode 5 is on international cooperation.  Episode 6 is summarizing people’s war against COVID-19 in China.  The footages had been shown before since Jan, so no one will get any surprise if he/she has followed it from the start.  An improvement could have been adding the dates and times to many footages in the documentary.  Another is to inject a scientific discovery and research angle, although this might be too nerdy for the mass.  Overall it provides a systematic overview and a record of many statistics. 

 

The documentary showed/confirmed how badly Wuhan hospitals were overwhelmed in late Jan.  On Jan 22, 2020, one hospital had 1700 people in for checkup.  That is just one of the many hospitals in Wuhan.  One can imagine what they looked like after Jan 23.  Indeed, episode 2 and others show plenty of footages.  On around Jan 28 there were 15K city-wide emergency calls, as patients were still waiting to get admitted to hospitals, which were >100% full.  This is entirely predictable and explained in my earliest COVID-19 blogs.  No city in the world can handle this kind of crisis or panicking, not Wuhan, not NYC.  Some issues might have been preventable if planned better, but some were inevitable, as both the disease and the lockdown were new to everybody.  The saddest part is that most people jamming the hospitals around Jan 23 were likely not COVID-19 positive going in, but many would get infected there through superspreading.  Because of this shortage in medical attention, the average/median time from symptom development to hospital admission in the early days were 9.8 days, which was too late for many patients.  A heartbreaking story is that a 90-year-old mother looked after her 64-year-old son who was infected but couldn’t be admitted.  So they stayed at the observation space in a hospital for days, when his other family members were too scared to join him.  His mother said, I am 90 years old, I don’t care.  The son was finally admitted to ICU but died on the same day, and his family hid the news from the mother for a long time.  

RNA testing was also limited.  Although no complete data were given, from the documentary it appears that tests in Wuhan around Jan 23 were on the order of merely hundreds per day, and surpassed 10K only at the end of Jan.  This is a far cry from the current 5 million daily capacity in China.  Considering that the initial kits might not be as good as the later versions, testing labs were still being built, and false negatives persist even today around the globe, the insufficiency in testing was not surprising but consequential, and explains why so many infections in Jan were not diagnosed quickly enough.  In retrospect, identifying the virus so quickly might even have been a curse: RNA testing then became the gold standard in diagnosis, but it might not be optimized or sensitive enough for the newly infected, hence missing patients after Jan 11.

Shortages in hospital beds were overcome by Feb 6, after Wuhan hospitals reorganized their facilities, two new field hospitals were constructed to take the severe cases, and 16 shelter hospitals set up for 12K mild cases.  Another shortage is masks and PPEs, which partly contributed to 3000 medical staff in Wuhan being infected, ~ 10 died.  There were in total only 100K N95 masks in China, and on Jan 26, 2020 there were 12.5K PPEs, but the daily need was 100K.  On Jan 25 China made only 8 million surgical masks per day, when the whole country pretty much had mandated masks in public.  This is well-known in China: in late Jan it was practically impossible to find a mask in any store.  

Thus, all information pointed to China caught surprised and ill-prepared for COVID-19.  This is the only thing China didn’t do well and could have done better, partly related to the question whether a lesser lockdown might have sufficed in Wuhan.  Not the so-called coverup, which is nonsensical based on all scientific evidence.  Certainly blows apart the ludicrous allegation that China used COVID-19 as a weapon.  In March and April, when the West was dealing with COVID-19 itself and found masks and PPEs wanting, politicians and media all blamed China hoarding materials for profits.  Even Intercept made a big fuss about the US exporting medical supplies to China in Feb and March, though not explicitly stating its point, as it knows the underlying premise was wrong.  It was purely an economical play, not to mention humanitarian.  In economy, when there is no need, actual or perceived, it is a waste to produce.  Even China, which provides the most such things for the whole world, didn’t have much in store in Jan.  Then, how could China use whichever as weapons?  And in those early days, should China not import, or should other countries not sell?   

Imports were a drop in the bucket anyway.  By Feb 22, 2020, China produced 110 million surgical masks per day, even more later.  As a result, of the 43K doctors and nurses from other provinces going to Wuhan and Hubei, none was known to be infected.  Unfortunately, not shown in the documentary but well reported previously, a handful of them died due to stress.  In addition to the medical staff, there were over 120K other people going into Wuhan and Hubei during the lockdown, building hospitals and performing other essential tasks.  Wuhan was not let hanging dry by any means, stories of people volunteering, helping others abound.  The documentary offers only a glimpse of those. 

In the West though, few such stories were reported or shown, if ever, only how people were angry.  Wuhan has 10 million people.  Even if only 1% are angry, that is 100K, hence if you want it, you will find it.  If I were locked down for 76 days (Jan 23 to April 8), I would be angry too, but this anger is not that kind of anger implied in the West.  In Jan and Feb most Western reporting derided Chinese responses.  When on Mar 10, 2020 Xi Jinping visited Wuhan, Western news cried that he wanted to claim success and credits, with many commentators predicting it would be his “Mission Accomplished” moment.  Six months later, has any of them had any self reflection?  While few knows for sure how the policies were decided, and we will never know if the lockdown Wuhan got were the best measure possible, nobody could have ordered the lockdown except Xi Jinping.  The lockdown achieved its objectives, and the cost in China, no matter how one prices it, pales in comparison to those in many other countries.

Even the most diehard in the West now can’t deny China has contained COVID-19, so the legendary Chinese coverup is the only fig leaf for their own failures.  If discovery requiring time means covering up, is there any scientist, or any person for that matter, never engaging in a coverup?  If China is covering up, is the UK not covering up, the US not covering up?  For every supposed Chinese "coverup", one can handily point to 10X as many worse things in the US.  The tragic irony is the gigantic Chinese coverup, even if true, which is not, is immaterial anyway: if the US had made just 30% of the Chinese efforts, shown openly on TV since Jan 23, such as testing, tracing, and wearing masks, starting on even Feb 15, its COVID-19 outbreak would have been much, much smaller.  Did China give the wrong virus sequence on Jan 11 so that the US couldn’t test, or did China cover up the lockdown and mask wearing too?  The mentality that we are always better than China, and fighting China with lies is more important than fighting the virus with science has led to the current COVID-19 situation.  WCEV is a much longer and worse pandemic.  Many, perhaps even most COVID-19 victims are also the victims of WCEV.