For most of his life, Li Wenliang was a successful but anonymous ophthalmologist, father and husband, based in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. But over the past two months, the 34-year-old had become a household name in China, known to hundreds of millions of people as the face and conscience of its spiralling coronavirus crisis.
Late on Thursday, after state-controlled media outlets reported that he had died days earlier, the news was met with an extraordinary nationwide outpouring of grief and anger on social media.
The response was an indication of how powerfully his story had resonated around the country as hundreds of millions of people faced the threat of a new disease, of still unknown lethality.
Li tried to warn fellow doctors in the early days of the outbreak, posting a message alerting them to a mystery new disease at his hospital in late December. Seven people were in quarantine, the symptoms were similar to Sars, and doctors should consider wearing protective equipment to prevent infection, he said.
Security forces came to his house four days after he sent that public health warning and accused him of “making false comments” and acting illegally to disturb social order. He signed a statement agreeing not to discuss the disease further.
Yet within a week he would be infected himself, and within two weeks, China and the world would be talking of little else beyond the new disease, now identified as a coronavirus.
Li himself was infected when he operated on a patient with glaucoma, who he did not know was carrying the virus. On 10 January he started to feel sick, and his symptoms worsened over the rest of the month.
Hospitalised with fever and breathing problems, as he fought the illness, he also decided to fight the government, going public with details of how he had been silenced in the name of stability.
He shared documents online and carried out interviews via text message, helping reporters piece together an alarming picture of official incompetence and negligence in the very period when containment might have been most possible.
Almost overnight, he became a public figure – and a particularly rare one willing to take on the government in a system designed to muffle or crush dissent.
Local authorities did eventually apologise to him and seven others investigated for “spreading rumours”, as public anger about the cover-up spread, and the central government admitted that the crisis had been mishandled in its early days.
But it came too late for hundreds who have died, tens of thousands who have been infected, and Li himself. His stance, and his illness, seemed particularly poignant to many because he is father to a young child and his wife is pregnant with their second baby.
His parents have also been reported as having contracted the virus. The health status of his wife and children is not clear.
After several negative tests, on 30 January he was finally confirmed as one of thousands of coronavirus patients, he said on a social media post, along with an emoji of a dog with its eyes rolled back and tongue hanging out, the BBC reported. “Today nucleic acid testing came back with a positive result, the dust has settled. Finally diagnosed.”
