Every journalist knows that a single death is a tragedy, a million a statistic. 68,000 people have recovered from the coronavirus outbreak, while nearly 5,000 have died. @vwang3 and I zoom in on two of them: two 29-yr-old female medical workers from Wuhan. tinyurl.com/qmqcype
@vwang3 We know that older people with pre-existing conditions form the bulk of fatalities but I've been thinking about the outliers: the younger people who have appeared to have recovered and then died suddenly. The most famous one was the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang.
As I was thinking about how to do this story, the Wuhan authorities announced last month that two 29-year-old doctors had died in a weekend. One of them was Xia Sisi, a gastroenterologist with a two-year-old son.
My colleague, Amber, and I spoke to her husband, Wu Shilei, over and over again. He was so patient with his time even amid his grief. So many years in this business and I still hate death knocks. I also cried listening to her mother. I ask you not to look away.
Amber spoke to the doctor who treated Dr. Xia. He remains baffled as to why she suddenly died, especially at such a young age. He says it was hypoxia, oxygen starvation of her organs. This was possibly because of a cytokine storm, an overreaction of the immune system.
A cytokine storm happens when the immune system goes berserk and kills everything in the way, healthy cells included. It was the main culprit of fatalities in the 1918 flu pandemic and the 2009 swine flu.
