Saturday 4 April 2020

Where is professor Ai Fen?

Screenshot of Ai Fen’s bio on Wuhan Hospital website
UPDATE 14 April: still there! 21 April: NOT. SEE BELOW
CORRECTION: 23 April. Still there
I really, really, really, really, hope it’s not true that Professor Ai Fen is “missing”. As this article ponders. Quoting a program on Australia’s “60 Minutes’.
Ai Fen is the Wuhan Hospital doctor, a specialist in infectious diseases, who first alerted her authorities and her colleagues -- all according to a protocol agreed after the SARS outbreak in 2002 -- to the fact of a new corona virus. Was then rebuked for that. Spoke to the People magazine about the issues, had that pulled by the communist apparatchiks within three hours.
The last we know of her is March 29, nearly a week ago.
If she’s been taken away, that is just so depressing, because it means that the sorts of heavy-handedness that we saw at the outset of the outbreak -- which one could kind of understand, perhaps even forgive, because you didn’t know what you were dealing with -- is going to go on and nothing has been learned. That would be just so depressing. Enough to make me think of moving, tbf.  Who wants to live in a place where the government, on which you count, learns nothing. Nothing.
So.... I’m still hoping. But worried. And depressed. This is clearly a good professional woman. I do hope she is back soon.
And I’m going to be checking into the website of the Wuhan Central Hospital, for the bio of Professor Ai Fen, every day, just to make sure she’s there.
And if that bio “disappears”? I dunno. Maybe I’ll go all ballistic. What then?
For the record, the translation of the bio above is:
Name: Ai Fen
Title: Director of Emergency Department, Deputy Chief Physician, Professor, Graduate Supervisor
Memberships: Chinese Women's Emergency Physician Association, Emergency Medical Branch of the Provincial Medical Association. Vice chairman of the emergency medical branch of the Wuhan Medical Association.
Expertise: Acute and critically ill patients, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest, poisoning, shock, trauma, respiratory failure, severe infection and multiple organ dysfunction.
 Related and with links to Science article: “Did China lie and does it matter?”
ADDED (22 April): my heart sinks. I got to the link above the screenshot above and find the following message. If she’s been sacked or punished somehow, the I don’t know when it happened between 14 April and now.... CORRECTION (23 April 2020): I can still get it on iPad. I think the problem is with the ISP of my desktop