China Clamps Down on Coronavirus Coverage as Cases Surge

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: China says it has made lifesaving reforms since the last time it was the source of a public health crisis 17 years ago. So why is the deadly coronavirus spreading so rapidly across the country? My colleague, Javier Hernández, reports from the center of the outbreak.

It’s Thursday, January 30.

Javier, how did you first hear about this outbreak?

Well, we started hearing reports in early January that there was this mysterious virus that was affecting Wuhan, which is a city in central China.

People were falling ill to this kind of pneumonia-like virus, which scientists were calling a coronavirus.

It’s a very frightening virus that spreads from animals to humans. It was believed to be behind some very serious respiratory illnesses, so it sounded pretty scary. But the official narrative was that this strain couldn’t pass from human to human. It would only go from animals to humans.

And at that point, they were saying that it was all originating at a single meat market in central China. This meat market sold wild animals, things like bamboo rats, badgers, wolves even. And the assumption was that people had come into contact with these animals and picked up this virus.

And it sounds like because it was one meat market, and because this virus could only pass from animals to humans, that this is a pretty small problem.

At this point, the reports were that only about 130 people had been infected and that, of those, only about four had died.

And so the prognosis was that the outbreak was controllable, that it was treatable and that things would be O.K.

And Javier, what are you thinking when you hear the Chinese government talking this way, saying that everything is going to be O.K.?

We were a bit skeptical. We knew that the Chinese government had a history of downplaying outbreaks like this. And as we saw more and more reports in the international media of this virus spreading, we began to question whether the officials were being totally upfront about what was happening.

And what do you mean when you say a history of downplaying situations like this?

Well before this virus, there was the outbreak of SARS 17 years ago. And it turned into this global health crisis that infected more than 8,000 people. It killed more than 800 people. And a big part of the reason that it spread so violently was because the Chinese government didn’t tell the world. And there was this period of months and months when it was spreading very rapidly in China, and the world just didn’t know about it. And for a lot of Chinese today, that experience with SARS makes them very skeptical of anything that the government says when it comes to public health.

And I imagine a reporter like you would be similarly skeptical.

Right. We really wanted to make sure that we got this one right.

We wanted to double check that this was, in fact, a small scale outbreak as the government was portraying it. And we wanted to talk to people who were getting sick with this virus to get a sense of what it was like for them — how severe it was, whether they were getting the care they needed.

And so what do you do?

So I live in Beijing. So I rushed to our bureau here and grabbed masks, enough to last me a couple days, and then headed to the airport and boarded a flight to Wuhan. And I just remember everyone on board, almost everyone, was wearing a mask. I was just struck by that. You never see people wear masks on this scale. And so it felt like there was this sense of anxiety already in the air even before we landed.

Once I got there, I rushed off to meet an ambulance doctor who had been posting on social media about this outbreak. And we had contacted him because he was challenging the official narrative about what was happening. He was saying he didn’t believe the official numbers. He thought that this could be another SARS-like outbreak.

And what was happening to his posts once they went online?

They lasted for a while, and then they would be taken down, just disappeared. It was clear that the government was cleaning and trying to scrub the internet of any critical questions about official data. And so we wanted to talk to him about what he was seeing on the ground.

And what did he tell you?

He told me that he felt like people weren’t taking enough precautions, that the government wasn’t being urgent enough. And he worked in a hospital and had a lot of interaction with doctors and other medical workers. So he felt like his job could be at stake if he were to come forward publicly.

So the numbers the Chinese government is providing are relatively small. This ambulance doctor you’re meeting with is saying the problem is bigger. So what do you do to try to reconcile those two pieces of information?

We wanted to find the people whose relatives had fallen ill to this virus. And so we were looking online for people who were reporting symptoms of fever, cough, basically anything that was associated with this kind of virus. And we stumbled on a guy from Shanghai. He was a 40-year-old architect, and he told me that his stepmother had died just a couple of days earlier from a mysterious pneumonia-like illness. And so I found him, sent him a message, and we agreed to meet at a cafe. [CHATTER]

And what is the story of what happened to his stepmom?

He tells me that she was a very healthy, normal 65-year-old woman who, a couple of weeks earlier, had started to feel like she was having a flu. So she had some coughing. She had kind of a sore throat, but it didn’t seem like anything that bad. But it suddenly began to worsen. She was having a fever. She needed a respirator to breathe. And all very suddenly she was sent to a contagious disease ward, and the family was told that she would likely die.

And what did she or her stepson understand about what was behind her illness?

They didn’t really understand much. For days and days, according to Mr. Wei, the family had tried to get her tested for this coronavirus, this mysterious virus that was spreading across Wuhan. And the doctors and other medical workers refused.

He pulled out his phone and showed me her death certificate, and all it said was that she died of severe pneumonia.

But why wouldn’t they test her, and what does it tell you that they wouldn’t test her?

It became clear to me in that moment that there seemed to be something going on here. Were these hospitals just not prepared? Did they not have enough testing kits? Were they running out of tests? Had they tested so many people that they didn’t have any tests left? Were they just not counting people anymore because they weren’t even diagnosing them? And if she wasn’t diagnosed with this illness, then maybe she wasn’t even included in the official count. And one other thing really stuck with me from my interview with Mr. Wei. And that was that the hospital, according to him, told them that his mother’s body had to be burned immediately, had to be cremated immediately. [CHATTER]

And what does that tell you? What does that mean to you that they’re burning these bodies?

It began to put in my head the sense that the hospital workers were beginning to think that this illness was contagious. And the fact that they wanted that body burned immediately began to suggest that perhaps they thought it posed a threat to other people.

Her death got us thinking about whether there were other people like her. And when you went online and search social media, you could quickly find others who were reporting similar experiences — people saying that they went to hospitals, they brought their sick relatives and were simply turned away. We began to kind of add things up, and it seemed like the numbers weren’t right.

So at this point, it sounds like your skepticism is growing, and it’s sounding pretty warranted. So what do you do next?

So I head back to my hotel and start to try to make sense of all of this. And as I’m sitting there in my room, I begin to see these reports emerging on social media —

— that one of China’s top health experts has acknowledged that this virus is now spreading from person to person, which had never been the case before.

And he’s an 83-year-old guy that they dug out of retirement essentially. He was a renowned expert during the SARS crisis. And suddenly, he’s all over social media, telling people that this crisis is much worse than had been previously known.

So this doctor is very much validating what you have been hearing.

Yes. He’s saying that there was even a case where one patient was able to infect 14 medical workers.

Wow.

And I begin to see the panic kind of spread across social media.

This is the moment when the world begins to wake up.

The numbers after that point just keep spiraling and spiraling.

You just hear people wondering whether the virus is ever going to be contained.

We’ll be right back.

And Javier, what are you thinking and feeling at this moment? Because you’re in this city. You’re interacting with people who are taking care of those who are sickened and infected by this illness.

Yeah.

Are you anxious?

Well I’m beginning to feel like this is much worse than I thought. And I think a sense of paranoia can easily settle in sometimes in these situations. I had masks. I was washing my hands all the time. But I couldn’t help but think about every button in the elevator that I touched, every surface and every cough or sniffle that I saw around me. The virus could be anywhere, so I had to be careful.

I mean, understandably.

So I finished up my reporting, and I grabbed a flight back to Beijing.

And then the very next day, I hear —

The Chinese government has placed this entire city under lockdown.

Wow.

So the city you have just left has basically told everybody else who remains that they’re not going anywhere.

Right. This city is being closed off in a way that China has never done before — or even any other major modern city, really, hasn’t done it in recent times.

And it was quickly becoming clear to the government that this wasn’t just a local problem.

They quickly expanded it to not just Wuhan, but to other cities, so that there were tens of millions of people who were essentially forced to stay at home and not allowed to go out. They’ve just put in place the biggest lockdown that we’ve ever seen and what experts are saying is the biggest experiment in public health that they’ve ever seen.

It’s hard to imagine most any other country being able to mount that kind of a response. I mean, I’m just trying to fathom an American city somehow being locked down.

So this is what it looks like when China’s authoritarian system is in full force. There’s no choice for people to leave. Many people are stuck there. They are going to hospitals that are overcrowded, but they can’t get the health care they need. Doctors are complaining about a lack of medical supplies and critical items like masks and goggles. And you get the sense that people are kind of stuck with what they have, and that’s the bargain they’ve made by living in this system. They have no choice but to follow the government’s orders. They can’t push back. They can’t swim against the current here. Everyone’s essentially forced to comply with this mass lockdown.

You know, from everything we’ve learned about China and its authoritarian government, it seems like it controls every aspect of its citizens’ lives and it surveils every aspect of citizens’ lives. And you’ve just walked us through how they were able to essentially suddenly drop a wall around Wuhan. So knowing all that, shouldn’t China’s government have been able to identify and control this outbreak before it got out of hand?

You would think that, because the government is so well known for being able to pull off these massive displays of citizen mobilization — it’s been known to be able to pull off these technological feats. But at the same time, there’s a flip side of this coin, which is that China’s authoritarian culture, in many ways, set the stage for this crisis.

What do you mean?

Well for decades, China has built this system, this ruthless system in which if you are an official in the Communist Party, you are expected to be almost perfect. If anything goes bad, you are the one who is going to take responsibility. You are the one who is going to fall. And this has created an incentive system where local officials fear saying anything about bad news. They worry that if they are found to have done something wrong, that they will lose their power. So in a situation like this, the incentive is to cover up. It’s to conceal. It’s to delay. It’s to try to get a handle on these problems on your own, hoping that perhaps nobody will ever hear about it.

So by the time something like, say, a medical crisis gets really big, it may be too late for the local officials who have been trying to contain it themselves and keep it from Beijing.

Exactly. These kinds of dynamics played a huge role in the scale of the SARS outbreak. It was clear in this case that local officials knew exactly what was going on. They knew that people were dying of this illness. But for months and months, they didn’t want to report it up the chain. Instead, they tried to cover it up. They tried to see if they could perhaps deal with it secretly, and maybe nobody would ever find out about it. They hoped that Beijing would know about it. But eventually it broke.

So did China learn from that experience with SARS, that dynamic that led to that breakdown, that cover-up?

China said it would make a lot of changes to its system after the SARS crisis. It said that it would expand its disease reporting system so that these kinds of reports from the local provinces would come to the central government in a more timely fashion. They promised to be more transparent in the release of data and other things. But what they didn’t change was this authoritarian culture, where people fear bringing bad news. And so that has actually gotten worse under President Xi.

Why?

He has made himself out to be the most powerful leader since Mao. He is somebody who’s always speaking about this great ascendant moment for China in which China is going to be this superpower. And anything that goes against Xi’s vision of this harmonious, resurgent China is going to be seen as a problem. And the people who are creating that problem will pay the consequences. And when I was there in Wuhan, I could sense the fear just rippling across all parts of the society. There were people like the ambulance doctor, who was afraid of challenging the official statistics. There were hospitals that seemed to be paralyzed, that didn’t want to test patients for fear of knowing the results. They didn’t want to be seen as speaking out or telling the truth or bringing this unsavory story into public view.

So that had trickled down all the way to the frontline health care workers, who are supposed to be treating this and sounding the alarm.

Right. They’re fearful of being seen as responsible for this crisis. They don’t want to stand out. And when you think about where this virus might be headed next — to other provinces, to other cities — you have to wonder if these same dynamics would be playing out again. If people will stay silent, if they will not report official cases, because they fear for their jobs and they fear for their livelihoods.

So it seems like whatever reforms the Chinese government made after the failures of SARS, that in the end, none of them really matter, because it hasn’t changed the problem that’s at the root of this.

At the root of all this is a sense of fear that is both the Communist Party’s strength, but it’s also a huge weakness. They can mobilize entire cities to be on lockdown. They can convince people to stay indoors. They can scrub social media of information that counters their narrative. That’s all very effective when you’re trying to get the public behind your policies. But at the end of the day, the fear is also a huge vulnerability. It creates this system where people are unwilling to speak out, unwilling to bring problems that are really important and that affect people’s lives.

Right. I mean, for the Chinese leadership, that works until it doesn’t, right? Until you very much need for people to stop being afraid and to speak out about something like a public health crisis.

Exactly.

And so when you look at the culture, you wonder whether China can actually contain these viruses, whether we will continue to live in a world where the internal politics of the party are going to put lives around the world in danger.

Javier, thank you.

Thanks, Michael.

On Wednesday, the total number of people infected by the coronavirus in mainland China surpassed those infected with the SARS virus during that epidemic. As of Wednesday evening, the virus had infected more than 6,000 people in mainland China. Later today, the World Health Organization will convene its emergency committee to determine whether the outbreak amounts to a public health emergency of international concern, its most severe classification.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The Times reports that the White House has sent former national security adviser, John Bolton, a letter, warning him not to publish a book in which he recounts speaking to President Trump about the quid pro quo with Ukraine at the heart of the impeachment trial. In the letter, the White House claims that the book contains significant amounts of classified information that could harm U.S. national security. The letter was sent before The Times published a story describing the book’s contents, a story that has further fueled calls for Bolton to testify in the Senate trial. Senators are expected to vote on whether to call witnesses like Bolton later today.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.