Regarding the excellent Aug. 27 editorial “In Wuhan, doctors knew the truth. They were told to keep quiet.”:
Nurses, as well as doctors, knew the truth and “bore an especially heavy burden.” At least 1,080 health-care providers in Wuhan, China, alone had laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, through Feb. 11, 2020, according to a landmark mid-February publication in the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Weekly journal.
On Dec. 26, 2019, at the same Xinhua Hospital where the radiologist cited in the editorial worked, the director of the respiratory medicine department, Zhang Jixian, diagnosed a patient with asymptomatic infection and person-to-person spread in a family of three. On Dec. 27, 2019, she notified her hospital leadership, who then initiated the process of notifying the Wuhan city Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the national Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing and China’s National Health Commission. By Dec. 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported 27 patients. In contrast to this transparency, what happened next was the focus of the editorial.
Daniel Lucey, Norwich, Vt.
The writer, an infectious-diseases specialist, is a clinical professor of medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine and the Dartmouth Institute.
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