Coronavirus: Doctor Hu Weifeng, colleague of Wuhan's whistleblower, is dead

Text by: RFI Follow

After a long battle of four months against the coronavirus, Doctor Hu Weifeng died on Tuesday June 2 in China. He worked in the same hospital in Wuhan as whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang. According to Chinese state media, her skin had darkened during her treatment.

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With our correspondent in Beijing, Stéphane Lagarde

Wuhan Central Hospital has paid a heavy price in the fight against Covid-19 viral pneumonia. After four months of fighting the disease, Dr. Hu Weifeng died on Tuesday at the age of 42. He is the fifth doctor in the establishment to have died there, after at least 69 caregivers tested positive on February 9.

After contracting the disease from his patients in mid-January, his condition quickly deteriorated. Like that of his fellow ophthalmologists Zhu Heping, 66, Mei Zhongming 57, Jiang Xueqing 56 and famous doctor Li Wenliang , the first to succumb to the infection.

This urologist had discovered the coronavirus without benefiting from appropriate protection. And for good reason: the human-to-human transmission of the killer virus was not yet official. After three months in intensive care, Hu Weifeng underwent surgery on April 22, which put him in a coma until his death. A video showing his face and that of another doctor with dark skin due to liver damage in the second month of treatment went viral on the Chinese web.

Hu Weifeng, a #Wuhan doctor who was ailing with # COVID19, passed away Tue after 4 months of treatment, media reported. His face had turned black, presumably due to the use of polymyxin B. pic.twitter.com/lRVHODSNSC

This Tuesday, the announcement of the disappearance of the "black-skinned doctor" led to an avalanche of tributes on the Sina Weibo network. Relatives would like to be remembered otherwise, especially as someone who also tried to alert other staff, including the captain of the hospital football team, asking them to stop team sports due to a mysterious epidemic that did not yet say its name.

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• China
• Coronavirus
• Health and Medicine