The news of his death got 1.5 billion views ... the story of the hero who warned China from SK in exchange for his life

Osama Abu Al-Rub

A Chinese ophthalmologist, but his work extended to confronting viruses, and he was the first to warn of the spread of the new Corona virus, but instead of being thanked and honored for that, he was reprimanded by the Chinese authorities, and on Friday he died of the virus. What is his story?

The story begins with the start of the new Corona virus in Wuhan, China, last December, at a food market that was selling wild animals in an irregular manner.

Doctor Li Wenliang, 34, who works at Wuhan Hospital, was the first to report the virus in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, in late December, according to AFP.

According to director of the Beijing office in Beijing, Nasser Abdul Haq, doctor Li Wenliang announced at the beginning of last January, saying that he had discovered seven cases of a virus similar to the SARS virus.

Li initially believed that the disease was a new strain of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that originated in China and killed nearly 800 people worldwide in 2002 and 2003.

communication Web-sites
Li told a group of doctors on Chinese social media and via the WeChat that it was confirmed that there was a link between seven SARS cases and a seafood market in Wuhan, believed to be the source of the virus.

Lee released a picture of the results of an analysis confirming the presence of the SARS virus - which resembles SARS - in a patient's sample, according to what appeared in a screenshot of the conversations that took place on the WeChat that Reuters viewed and verified.

Send me messages on social media and warn about the new Corona virus, which has angered the police.

On January 3, Lee was forced to sign a letter in which he said he had "caused significant damage to public order," and was threatened with charges.

I had one of eight people who had been bullied by the police in Wuhan last month, after being accused of spreading "false and illegal" information about an influenza-like virus.

Later he told me the government media that he had been reprimanded by the hospital administration and Communist Party officials, after he alerted his colleagues to a group of sick symptoms associated with an animal market in Wuhan.

Supreme court
In January, the Chinese Supreme Court criticized the Wuhan police for punishing the first "promoters of rumors," saying that the crisis would not have become that bad "if people believed those (rumors) at that time."

On February 1, he told me on the Weibo website that the results of his tests confirmed he was infected with Corona virus, and that he was believed to have been infected last January after being treated for a glaucoma patient without knowing that he was carrying the Corona virus.

After midnight on Friday, Wuhan Central Hospital - where he worked for me - said that he was in critical condition, and about three hours later, he confirmed his death and said, "The comprehensive efforts to save him have not succeeded. We are very sorry and feel sad about the loss."

And the hospital announced that Lee had died at 2:58 pm on Friday night local time (18:58 pm on Thursday GMT).

It was noteworthy that official media - such as the national "CCTV" television and the "Global Times" newspaper - had announced Lee's death on Thursday evening, before pulling the news.

Without waiting for confirmation that the doctor was dead, the World Health Organization, for its part, expressed sadness.

"We mourn the death of Li Wenliang, Wuhan's doctor ... despite all efforts to rescue him, he died at 02:58," the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, wrote on Twitter.

National champion
After Li's death, a Chinese inspection authority announced Friday to open an investigation, and said in a statement that the investigation team would go to Wuhan "to conduct a thorough investigation of doctor Li Wenliang's issues raised by people."

The director of the Al-Jazeera office in Beijing, Nasser Abdel Haq, said that the announcement of the Chinese authorities to conduct an investigation may have come from it to contain what could be called a "revolution" on social media, after the news of the doctor's death spread.

Abdelhak added that the news of the doctor's death on the Chinese Weibo website - which is parallel to Twitter - got about a billion and a half views.

The director of the Beijing island’s bureau said that the Chinese authorities ’announcement of an investigation into the matter, may have come to absorb the anger of the public and Internet users who have been accused of not paying attention to what the doctor announced since the beginning of December, when the government did not pay him attention.

Doctor Lee has become a national hero in the face of local officials accused of trying to conceal the disease when it first spread, and one of his colleagues wrote on Weibo: "He is the hero who forewarned the disease in exchange for his life."

"Let all the officials who fill their stomachs with public money," said a WIPO user, in a comment that was immediately removed from censorship.

Lee's death sparked a wave of support on social media, and the doctor became a national symbol of people's attempts to obtain answers about the authorities' initial response to the spread of the Coruna virus.

Communication and grief also prevailed, and many of its users described to me a hero, accusing the authorities of neglect during the early stages of the outbreak.

Mess
Some believe that Lee's death is a reflection of the chaos in Wuhan hospitals with the influx of patients, and a senior official acknowledged Thursday that the medical teams are no longer sufficient and that they lack equipment to prevent the virus.

The Wuhan government was criticized for what many saw as a failure to early detection of the severity of the new disease, which led to more injuries between medical and public personnel, and Beijing has not released any data on the number of medical workers who have been infected with the new virus.

The National Health Committee of China said that the number of virus deaths on the Chinese mainland rose to 636 people today, Friday, when 73 new cases died in addition to 3,143 new confirmed cases, raising the total number of infections to 31,161 people.

The virus has spread around the world, and Reuters calculations, which were based on official data, showed that there are 320 infections in 27 countries and regions outside the mainland.

tyranny
For his part, the writer Chen Guangzhengofi said his report, published by the American newspaper "Washington Post", that the Chinese Communist Party has demonstrated once again that tyranny is dangerous, not only for human rights but also for public health.

He spoke of the brave citizens of Wuhan who transmit first-hand information about the Corona epidemic to their countrymen and the outside world, they do so and put themselves at great risk, knowing that they will face possible reprisals for their heroic act of merely revealing the truth.

He adds that videos taken by brave locals last weekend, especially by citizen journalists Fang Ping and Chen Zhouchi, reveal the facts.

The video clips showed bodies lying in the street or transported outside the homes, and a truck carrying eight bags of dead bodies awaiting the transfer of the dead from the hospital to the Holocaust, and rows of people sneaking through the hospital wards waiting for testing and registration, where every cough in the crowd causes people to fall back involuntarily, dozens sit Others are in a waiting room, clenching their hands with venous lotion bags dangling incorrectly from the ceiling as if they were a floating jellyfish in an aquarium.

In the videos, the writer added, you will hear the people crying for their parents and their loved ones who are dying while they are lying in bed, and you will see people leaning against the walls or lying in the corridors, and you will see the dead lying on the stretchers next to them and covered with flowering duvets brought from home.

All health care workers wear protective suits, while ordinary people move to and from hospitals, protected only by face masks, all of whom hide behind hidden identities. Strange silence reigns, as if the same words would spread the disease more.

The writer claims that CPC officials are keen to prevent those who get sick from leaving their homes by keeping their doors closed, and hospitals and clinics refuse to treat people because they cannot pay (despite formal promises of free care), so that they return to their homes to care for themselves and their families or to surrender to disease on their own.

Without the approved diagnoses, these deaths will not be counted in the official statistics of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on the new disease.

prison
The writer refers to the decision of the Communist Party of China regarding the construction of a new hospital aimed at combating the virus within ten days, which caused a sensation, as the authorities promised to provide a thousand new beds after the outbreak of infection and infected more than twenty thousand people.

But some likened the building to the prison, where the doors are only opened from the outside, and they have very small openings, and the windows have iron bars.

For his part, writer James Palmer said in his report published by the American "Foreign Policy" magazine, "Wuhan mourns the first martyr of the virus ... the death of the doctor who alerted Corona's danger, and the question now is whether Beijing will celebrate his sacrifice or bury his story."

The author said that doctor Li Wenliang had tried to raise the alarm since December, and he was among the eight doctors who published reports of the virus online, fearing that the disease would spread and spread from person to person.

But the local government responded by sending the police to threaten him and force him to sign a statement, saying he would not cause more trouble. And the written statement said: "We officially warn you: If you continue stubbornness with such insolence, and you continue in this illegal activity, you will be delivered to justice, so is this understood?"

Li died at the moment, as many sources have announced his death, similar to the highly respected Caixin Group and the Communist Party's Global Times. But as news spread about his death, such as a wildfire on social media, previous reports and all related topics were deleted, one of which recorded five million comments, and Lee was said to have "refreshed" but remained "in critical condition".

Maybe I already had his last breath or the government might be afraid of being a "martyr", but in the end, his employer announced that he had died at 2:58 pm on Friday night.

Not the first
The writer mentioned that Lee is not the first medical worker to die from the virus, but was Liang Wudong, 62, but they will not be the last. There are estimates that more than five hundred health care workers are already infected.

The author believes that covering up the potential epidemic that Lee and others tried to uncover, contributed to his killing.

He pointed out that the Monitoring Committee seeks to get rid of as soon as possible a picture of me on the Internet, in addition to the statement that he was forced to sign, and adds, "The Chinese government faced a difficult decision. Will it adopt the image of a man who helped the official decisions to kill him in the hope of holding the responsibility of his death to A failure of the Wuhan authorities? Or will they continue to erase his name and image and suppress the stories of another potential martyr? ”