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| Ai Fen, director of the emergency at Wuhan Central hospital. |
BEIJING—Chinese censors rushed to suppress a magazine interview with a Wuhan doctor who was silenced after she alerted others to the new coronavirus now spreading across the globe.
But her interview, first published in Mandarin, is now rocketing around the internet in English, French, Hebrew, Farsi, Morse code—and a mashup of Elvish and Klingon.
The translations are part of an effort by Chinese internet users to preserve the interview, in which Ai Fen, a doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, recalled sounding alarm bells in December about a mysterious illness that was later identified as the new coronavirus.
The story was censored soon after the Chinese magazine People published it on Tuesday, the same day President Xi Jinping made his first visit to the central city of Wuhan since it was identified as the center of the epidemic in January.
In the interview, Dr. Ai recounts warning her superiors at her hospital on Dec. 30 that lab results showed a patient had been infected by “SARS coronavirus,” the same family of viruses that killed nearly 800 world-wide after emerging in China in 2002. “I was so scared I broke out in a cold sweat,” she told the magazine. “I knew it was trouble.” (Read More)