COVID-19: Stage 3 - The beginning of the end...
4:00 am... impossible to sleep... too many things in his head... Images of the past few weeks colliding in his brain with frightening thoughts about what might happen next... He turns and turns in his bed... Desperately changing position every half-a-minute hoping he might find the right one and eventually fall asleep for a few hours... but in vain.
A quick look at the clock again, 4:01 am... this minute felt like an eternity. Agony. Lament. Frustration. What to do? He does not know and it is driving him crazy. How to stop the images from bombarding the inner walls of his skull? His head feels like an empty metal helmet with a bouncing ball inside. He massages his temples a little, hoping it might help...
He stands from his bed and walks in the apartment. Slightly groggy by the sleeping pills he took hours ago. They did not work and only accentuated his headache. He stops in the living room by the large window giving to the balcony. It is dark outside. The weather sucks. Despite a few rare days of sunshine, low dark clouds have obstructed the Hong Kong sky for months. Like every winter, from January to April, since he moved to the "Pearl of the Orient" nearly a decade ago.
Located nearly at the top of a towering residential building, the view of the nearby mountain from his apartment is usually quite nice at this height, even at night. But, not tonight. A thick drizzle covering everything makes the nearby buildings appear like barely discernable, eery giant ghost figures. Only sparse faint lights from the street down below and a few other apartments seem able to pierce the thickness of this intrusive white blanket. Probably some sleepless souls like him.
He can't stop thinking about everything that has occurred in the past few months and how fast things unfolded and escalated, even more rapidly shortly after, in the last few weeks. It reminds him of a movie he saw recently on TV, titled "Contagion". And for good reason, as the current events unfold exactly like in this 2011 movie inspired by previous pandemics such as the 2003 SARS epidemic and the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It was the first time he had watched this movie. Scary, saddening and frightening. Even more so, as it became nowadays reality (again).
It all started in the Chinese city of Wuhan, in the Hubei province. Some say probably as early as late November or early December 2019. However, the official story only starts mid- December, when a local doctor, Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist working at Wuhan Central Hospital, was observing a cluster of people (7 persons apparently) presenting some acute respiratory symptoms and fever, leading him to think of something similar to pneumonia at first.
Following closely the evolution of the 7 patients, as well as searching for the cause of their disease in samples of their blood, the doctor(s) discovered the culprit: a novel coronavirus, somehow similar to SARS. The virus causes severe acute respiratory infection and symptoms usually start with a fever, followed by a dry cough.
On December 30th, with reminiscent thoughts of both SARS and the swine flu in mind, the doctor(s) informed his colleagues and superiors by sending a message via a chat group warning them to wear protective clothings (masks, gloves, etc...) to avoid getting infected.
On December 31st, the World Health Organization (WHO) was notified of an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan.
By 2 January 2020, a total of 41 people were hospitalised with pneumonia at the Wuhan Central Hospital and were officially identified as having laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Four days after warning his colleagues, Dr Li was summoned by the local authorities to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter accusing him of "making false comments" that had "severely disturbed the social order". Admonitions for his behaviours and reprimand for a breach of rules, making false comments and divulging false information to the public.
As a result, he ended up being investigated, with 7 other persons, for "spreading rumours", leading to his comments to be deleted and the discovery of the new virus he was trying to warn people about to be fully covered up by the local authorities and the government and evidently not talked about.
The local authorities apologize later on, and the doctors were able to continue working, and follow up on the situation with the initial cluster of 7 persons as well as the other persons who also got infected in between, by what was still considered as a new SARS-like coronavirus type, of which the initial name of "SARS-CoV-2" was changed to "2019-nCOV" (standing for "2019 novel Coronavirus").
Meanwhile, since late December, and more particularly beginning of January, and despite the efforts of the local authorities in Wuhan and the Chinese government to discreetly contain and diminish the situation, for the rest of the world not to be aware of it, photos and videos started to crowd the internet and social media.
They were showing disturbing images of people in Wuhan, at hospitals, at their home and even in the street, panicking, overwhelmed by the situation, disoriented, in distress, some looked sick, some were even collapsing and injuring themselves, some even appeared to be dead... in the street. Rumours and conspiracy theories were mushrooming
The death toll had already begun. Some patients, as well as some doctors and nurses who got infected, started to die. Proof and evidence of human-to-human transmission were known since at least mid to late December, but nothing really transpired out of Wuhan or even China in general. Except maybe that the patient suffering of pneumonia may have been exposed and may have developed it after being in contact with wild animals sold at one of the wet markets in Wuhan.
On January 1st, the Huanan Seafood Market, in Jianghan District, Wuhan (Hubei province, China), defined as the original place were the infection started, was closed for sanitary procedures and disinfection. Out of the 585 environmental samples taken from the market, 33 showed evidence of the coronavirus disease 2019 nCOV, confirming the market as the epicentre of the contamination.
On 2 January 2020, it was confirmed that out the 41 patients diagnosed with the 2019 nCOV infection, two-thirds had been exposed to the wet market in Wuhan, and despite the fact that one-third of these initially infected cases had nothing to do with it, the news that the virus came from the Huanan Seafood Market (in Jianghan District, Wuhan) broke and set the press on fire worldwide.
On January 10, Dr Li started coughing. The next day, he started to have a fever, and 2 days later he was hospitalized.
To be continued... work in progress....
Thank you for reading this post.
Take good care of yourself and stay safe.
Domelgabor
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