Today is sunny and warm. Sitting by the window reading a book taking in some sun feel very nice. However, according to the weather report, beginning tomorrow we will have several days of rain. The cherry blossoms have bloomed in our small community. Too bad it is just one tree without many blossoms so from a distance it looks like a pink mist rising up into the sky. The cherry blossoms on the Wuhan University campus have probably bloomed as well.
When was a student I especially disliked this time of year since the campus would get jam-packed with people and on paths stretching along ranks of cherry trees all one could see was a great mass of black-haired heads. So how could anyone appreciate then the beauty of the cherry blossoms? This cherry blossom season nobody went to see them. I really do envy the faculty and staff who live on campus who have their own cherry blossom garden.
The past few days the trash we put outside the gate often gets scattered far and wide. I didn’t realize at first what was going on then my mother said that it must be stray cats “How sad. There isn’t anyone outside so now nobody takes care of the little wandering animals.” I thought that must be the reason.
I could only sigh and think that everyone and everything are suffering from this epidemic.
My friend told me that in their community two people killed themselves by jumped out of their buildings. Then I realized that the reports I had seen on the Weibo microblog about an old man who had killed himself were about their community. A mother pregnant with her second child also killed herself there.
I have heard of other suicides recently. I don’t know anything about the personal circumstances but they do have indicators — a lonely old man and a woman in her second pregnancy — I can guess that some of these cases may be related to depression and hopelessness caused by the difficulties that they face.
We are all waiting for the end of the epidemic. If you have never lived through this experience yourself, it is hard to understand what it is like. This affects people in different ways so unavoidably there are some people who feel that they just won’t make it so I don’t have the heart to tell people to “be brave”. That would just be too flippant and arrogant a thing to say. I can only hope that we will soon be done with this very difficult situation.
A few days ago, the Zhong Nanshan group published in the Journal of Thoracic Disease and article entitled “Predictions on Trends of the Chinese COVID-19 Outbreak Based on the SEIR Optimization Model and AI”. According to the article:
“A five-day delay in implementation would have increased epidemic size in mainland China three-fold. Lifting the Hubei quarantine would lead to a second epidemic peak in Hubei province in mid-March and extend the epidemic to late April. Were the interventions to be introduced 5 days earlier than they had been, the number of cases nationwide would have been two-thirds less.” [Note 120K vs 40K with wide 95% confidence intervals on text available online. Article preprint available PDF online in English http://jtd.amegroups.com/article/view/36385# End note].
The first time I saw this article was on Dr. Ding Xiang (a public social media accout). Later I saw it several times in other places. Then official media picked it up. The most interesting thing about it is that when official media share the article they deleted that last line..
Wuhan was closed on January 23. Five days before that was January 18, a saturday when I went with friends to a museum and the theater. The theater was bustling and there wasn’t an empty seat in the theater. We didn’t know then that that terrible virus was silently spreading all around us. Fortunately my friends and I were wearing face masks but only ten or twenty percent of the people there were wearing face masks. Here I don’t want to be imagine myself after-the-fact some great hero like Zhu Geliang “If only at the time I had done this or that”. I don’t have any expert skills and I don’t have any authority myself, but where were the experts and the people in authorty then? They are there to protect us!
Today we know a number of lines of evidence from which we can deduce that by January 18th things were already extremely serious. But there was no “management and control” going on. At that time the word the propaganda people were putting out was still “there is just limited person-to-person disease transmission going on” and that “no medical workers have been infected”. Please now, I ask you, what good are you people?
Today on social media microblogs I saw a video by the “miraculous doctor” Li Yuehua someone who has no medical license whatsoever. When I saw the name, it look familiar. Then I realized that wasn’t he the family physician who Chen Beiyang, that former deputy commissioner of the Justice Bureau who had demanded a high class sickroom for himself, had mentioned in his letter of apology as someone who had “astonished the nation’s leaders with the effectiveness of his treatments”?! When I thought of that I smiled to myself because I never thought that story would have gotten around so quickly.
This guy practicing medicine without a license, the miraculous Dr. Li, seriously claimed that his medicine can “kill the virus”. The therapy was to give an injection of phenol at four acupuncture points on the chest. Not to mention that this had long been used, but went on to say that this therapeutic method can cure the common cold, mumps, measles, shingles, and viral facial paralysis. All these are self-limiting illnesses that get better on their own. If that kind of fraudster can fool a deputy commissioner of the Justice Bureau, that those old guys in authority must really be pretty weak-minded!
Today is the anniversay of the death of Yu Luoke [Note: Yu Luoke, a 28 year-old apprentice in the optics department of the People’s Machinery Plant, was executed at a rally in Worker’s Stadium on March 5, 1970 for having written an essay opposing the Cultural Revolution. End note] . There are some things and some people who can never be forgotten.
3月5日 武汉封城第43天
今天阳光和暖，坐在窗边晒太阳看书正好。不过看天气预报，明天开始又会有连续几天的降雨。
小区里的樱花开了，可惜只有一棵，开得单薄，远远看着仿佛一团粉色的雾气在蒸腾。武汉大学的樱花大概也快开了，以前读书的时候特别烦这个季节，因为学校里摩肩接踵全是人，樱花大道上放眼望去只有一片黑压压的脑袋，哪里能看出花的美。今年的花季当然是没人去了，可得羡慕住在学校里的教职工，拥有了一整片樱园。
最近几天放在门外的垃圾袋常常被翻得乱七八糟，我起初没想明白是什么原因，妈妈告诉我应该是流浪猫找吃的，“可怜，外面没有人，流浪的小动物更没人管了”。
想想应该是这个缘由，只能默默叹气，万物皆为刍狗。
朋友告诉我，他们小区最近发生了两起跳楼自杀的事件，我才想起微博上看到的自杀老人正是他们小区，除这位老人外还有一个年轻的二胎妈妈。
这不是最近听说的仅有的自杀事件，我并不知道这几位自杀者的生活情况，但是看到与之相关的标签：孤寡老人、二胎妈妈，大概也能猜出几分由抑郁、艰难而生的绝望。
我们每个人都在等待疫情结束的那一天，这份“等待”中的艰难，不是身处其间、不是本人恐怕难以体会。各人境遇不同，难免有自觉过不去的难关，不忍心去要求别人“勇敢”，那样就太轻佻太傲慢了。唯愿现在这极端处境可以尽快结束，给人解脱。
前几天，钟南山团队在Journal of Thoracic Disease发表了“基于SEIR优化模型和AI对公共卫生干预下的中国COVID-19暴发趋势预测”的文章，其中提到：
“如管控措施推迟5天实施，中国大陆的疫情规模预估将扩大至3倍；如减低武汉管控力度，湖北可能在3月中旬出现第二次疫情高峰并延续至4月下旬。如果早五天防控，最终感染人数将减少三分之二。”
我第一次看到这段文章是在丁香医生（一个医学专业公众号）上，之后又看到几次，则是其它官媒的转发，有趣的是，官媒在转发的时候基本都删去了最后一句。
1月23日封城，往前倒数5天是18日，那天是周六，我跟朋友去了博物馆和剧院，博物馆里人群熙熙攘攘，剧院里座无虚席，而我们那时都不知道这么可怕的病毒就在我们身边悄无声息的蔓延。好在我和朋友都戴了口罩，那时戴口罩的人不过只有十分之一二而已。
现在我当然不是要当事后诸葛“如果当时如何如何”，我既没有这样的专业能力，也没有行政力量，但是有专业能力和行政力量的人彼时在哪里呢？他们的存在就是应该保障我们的安全啊！从现在已知的种种已经可以推测知道在18日的情况已经非常严峻，可是别说“管控”了，那时候的宣传措辞还是“有限人传人”“没有医护人员感染”……请问要你们有什么用？
今天在微博看到一个视频，主角是一位行医证都没有的“神医”李跃华，乍见这名字我就觉得眼熟，后来想起来，这不就是之前要求高干病房、拒不入院的司法厅前副厅长陈北洋的道歉信里提到的那位“治疗效果惊动中央高层”的家庭医生吗？！想到这个我就乐了，没想到这故事的续集来的这么快。
视频里这位非法行医的李神医言之凿凿自己的药可以“杀死病毒”，治疗方法就是在脖子上的四个穴位各打一针苯酚……别说苯酚早已有之，他提到的此种疗法能治疗的疾病：感冒、腮腺炎、带状孢疹、病毒性面瘫，都是自限性疾病，原本就是能自愈的。
这种水平的骗子就能骗倒司法厅副厅长，这些大老爷们是有多弱智啊！
今天还是遇罗克的忌辰，有些事、有些人，永远不能被遗忘。
Thanks for writing this.