On 30 December 2019, Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, received a diagnostic report describing suspected SARS coronavirus alongside other respiratory findings. She circled the word “SARS,” photographed the report, and sent it to another doctor; the image reached ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who warned former classmates through WeChat. Ai said she was subsequently questioned by hospital superiors and, after reporting additional suspected cases on 1 January 2020, subjected to what she described as “unprecedented and very severe rebuke” for allegedly spreading rumors. The source also reports that hospital officials later denied human-to-human transmission at a 16 January meeting.
People magazine published Ai’s first-person account, “The Whistle-Blower,” on 10 March 2020, but the article was removed within roughly three hours and reposts were deleted. Chinese internet users recirculated it using emojis, Morse code, braille, pinyin, and other formats to evade censorship. Ai’s account is a whistleblower disclosure rather than an independent finding, and some early medical details in the source lack citations; however, the removal of the article and the broader censorship campaign are documented in the supplied text. The episode became a prominent example of how institutional reprimands and online information controls obstructed early public-health warnings during the COVID-19 outbreak.
