According to several state media reports, The Chinese doctor who tried to warn others about the Wuhan coronavirus months ago, and was silenced, has died from the illness.
Dr. Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old doctor in Wuhan, posted about the novel coronavirus last December in his medical school alumni group on the Chinese messaging app WeChat, that seven patients from a local seafood market got infected with a SARS-like illness and were quarantined in his hospital.
Days after he sent the message, Li was charged with rumor-mongering by the Wuhan police. He was one of many medical people targeted by police for trying to blow the whistle on the contagious and deadly virus in the first weeks of the outbreak, which made 28,000 people sick and got 560 people killed.
The doctor was admitted to the hospital on January 12 after getting the virus from one of his patients and was diagnosed to have the coronavirus on February 1.
On Thursday, the World Health Organization replied to the sad news of Li’s death on Twitter, saying:
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Dr. Li Wenliang. We all need to celebrate work that he did on #2019nCoV.”
As of today, the death toll and the number of people infected by the Wuhan coronavirus continue to soar, with no signs of going down despite extreme quarantine and population control methods that were put in place in central China.
According to official reports, the number of confirmed cases globally is at 28,275 as of Thursday, with more than 28,000 of those in China. The number of cases in China grew by 3,694, or 15%, on the previous day. There have been 565 deaths so far, all but two of which were happened in China, with one from the Philippines and another one from Hong Kong.
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