Doctor doing his best to reassure people

As the coronavirus epidemic develops, a Shanghai doctor is easing public fears with his enthusiasm as well as rational analyses of the situation.

On Wednesday, Zhang Wenhong, head of the infectious diseases department at Huashan Hospital affiliated with Fudan University, ordered his doctors who are Party members to take over all the frontline jobs in the ongoing fight against the virus, which has so far affected more than 7,000 people nationwide in confirmed cases.

“There’s no bargaining,” he said at a media briefing. “A Party member must go to the front.”

From the end of last year to the present, many doctors in Zhang’s department have been working on the frontline. He spoke highly of them: “These are great doctors. They dared to expose themselves before the virus on day one when there was scant knowledge about its risk.”

There are 49 doctors in Zhang’s department, 25 of them Party members. Many of the Party members have already worked day and night on the frontline “almost without a rest,” Zhang said.

Zhang was among the first in his department to rush to the frontline of the battle against the virus that broke out in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province, and later spread across the nation and some other parts of the world. Before he gave the media briefing on Wednesday, he had just returned on a red-eye flight from a field inspection to Henan Province, next to Hubei. Instead of taking a nap, he wrote a lengthy article for his department’s WeChat account to tell readers how things stood. 

Despite their work on the frontline, he and his team have been updating the WeChat account every day with timely analyses to dispel public worries. One article generated a readership of more than 10 million.

His words and deeds have defined what it takes to be a good doctor at a time when good doctors are most needed. A doctor is good not just for his medical skill, but also for his profound love of patients. In a media report on January 13, Zhang was quoted as saying that a doctor treating infectious diseases must “radiate with infectious enthusiasm” – selfless devotion to people’s health. By fighting diseases on the frontline, the report said, he made great contributions to the defeat of SARS in 2003 and many other viruses that appeared later.

In a widely circulated video speech in 2018, Zhang said people are having better lives because of the strenuous efforts of a group of people called doctors. “It’s not that we are noble,” he said. “It’s just that we worry about humanity’s fate every day.”

In that speech, he said epidemics had been able to spread far and wide ever since humanity entered an agricultural society several thousand years ago where people began to live together in groups. 

“The human society is beautiful, but there are dangers,” he said in the speech. “Many dangers come from man himself … We must keep away from pollution.”

In a way, we pollute our health when we eat something that we should not eat. It was the case with the source of SARS in 2003. It may also have been the source of the current virus.

“But don’t panic,” he said in the speech. “China’s public health system has improved a lot since SARS, although one cannot be 100 percent sure.”

And in the article he wrote in Wednesday’s wee hours, he said: “Things are not as well as have been thought, nor as bad.” He added: “We’re confident to see a turning point in two weeks.”

In the article, which has been read more than 100,000 times, he called the ongoing battle "an unprecedented duel between a super virus and a nation’s efforts." He quoted foreign experts as saying that China’s isolation measures (restricting people traffic in certain areas) should have a positive result, although not all such measures in human history had worked well.

The positive attitude from those foreign experts “had to do with their trust in the strong execution power of the Chinese government,” he said.

In fact, it’s not just “closing the door” of a certain city. “It’s easy to close the door of a city, but more important is to manage each and every community, to let every villager know about the virus, and to let everyone from the epidemic area to be voluntarily isolated (for a certain period),” he said. “China has done just that!”

With his medical skill, Zhang saves lives in hospitals. With his love for his patients and the wider public, he sacrifices his rest to write or proofread articles every day to dispel misplaced worries. He does not shout slogans. He tells us what he knows from his heart.