She wakes up every other hour as she tries to sleep. Diarrhea keeps her up all night. There’s a persistent bitter taste in her mouth.
For Wei, a millennial in the epidemic ground zero of Wuhan, the burning question of whether she has the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, has lingered since Jan. 18, when she went to a bar and came back home feeling sick. But three CT scans and two nucleic acid tests later—which came back negative—she remains only a “suspected” case.
The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Party’s mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
Several of Wei’s friends are in the same boat. Xia, for example, has dry coughs and insomnia. Another, who had similar symptoms as Wei, later developed pulmonary calcification and was diagnosed with COVID-19. She’s now in serious condition.
“No one cares about us,” she told The Epoch Times in an interview. Wei doesn’t have the common symptoms of fever and coughing, but hasn’t recovered from her mysterious illness.
Are these people really virus-free?
Wei has a friend whose lungs’ CT scan looked like “frosted glass” (ground-glass opacity, a common clinical trait of patients), but tested negative for COVID-19 eight times.
“Wuhan is controlled. There’s no way you can get diagnosed. They [authorities] have made up the data and your tests will turn out negative, no matter what,” Wei said.
Makeshift Hospitals
Meanwhile, questions persist over the fate of patients who were released after Wuhan’s makeshift hospitals were shut down. The last one closed down on March 10.
They were set up in the city’s stadiums, expo centers, and gyms to treat the growing number of patients. But this month, city authorities announced that fewer patients were being admitted, and therefore, the facilities would no longer be needed.
The Epoch Times previously interviewed Fu, a patient with mild symptoms, who stayed at a temporary hospital in the Hanyang District of Wuhan, along with 900 other patients, until the facility discharged her on Feb. 28. On March 10, she received a diagnosis report indicating film spurs in both lungs, while her artery, liver, and gallbladder were damaged.
Fu spoke with 20 other patients who were discharged despite having similar lung damage.
A Second Wave?
In the past few weeks, China has been reporting a declining number of infections. For 10 days in a row until March 15, Chinese authorities reported no new cases in all regions outside of Wuhan. On March 16, authorities reported 21 new cases in the whole country, with 12 of them being imported cases, or people infected with the virus who had arrived in China from a foreign country.
If all goes well, around March 20, the country might be cleared of new infections, and Wuhan businesses may be able to resume production in another two weeks, Li Lanjuan, a senior expert at China’s National Health Commission, told Chinese state media.
Since late January, authorities in Hubei Province, where Wuhan is the capital, enacted strict lockdown measures, closing down all public transportation and roads.
But this month, parts of Hubei began easing restrictions. Wuhan itself announced it would allow people to travel into Wuhan again, provided they self-quarantine for 14 days at their own expense.
International experts have questioned whether the lowered numbers of infections could continue.
“As the country revs up its economy and reintegrates into the world, there remains danger of re-introduction of the virus,” Laurie Garrett, an expert on epidemics and columnist for Foreign Policy, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a recent interview with ABC, said the U.S. authorities were paying attention to what happens in China after lockdown measures ease up and people start resuming normal life.
“Hopefully, it will stay down, but it possibly could come back up,” Fauci said.
Chen Bingzhong, a former official at China’s National Health Commission, was skeptical about the Chinese figures.
“I think this is impossible. It’s such a serious disease, they are basically falsifying data,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s impossible for China to have zero new cases—it suppressed it [data] so that many cases were simply not reported.”
The Epoch Times has previously obtained internal government documents that detail how authorities are underreporting confirmed diagnoses and destroying relevant data.
Restrictions Remain
Authorities also hinted at a more severe outbreak.
In Beijing, the city’s education commission announced on March 17 that all schools will remain closed due to the CCP virus.
Netizens also shared a video of what appeared to be local government staff cleaning a road sign dated March 12 that reads, “All highways out of Hubei Province have been closed down.”
From The Epoch Times
