Chinese state media accounts, among the first to praise the late Mr Li as a “whistleblower,” have since deleted their original posts from Twitter.

“Refusing to listen to your ‘whistling,’ your country has stopped ticking, and your heart has stopped beating,” Hong Bing, the Shanghai bureau chief of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, said in an now-deleted online post.

Selfies of Mr Li on his death bed were widely circulated. His death became the top-read topic on China's microblogging site Weibo on Friday, with over 1.5 billion views.

Before his death he had became one of the most visible figures in the crisis after he revealed he had been reproached by Wuhan police last month for "spreading rumours" about the coronavirus.

Mr Li “is a tragic reminder of how the Chinese authorities’ preoccupation with maintaining ‘stability’ drives it to suppress vital information about matters of public interest,” said Nicholas Bequelin of Amnesty International, a human rights group.

The social media backlash, which has echoes of the botched emergency response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, came as the state continued to insist it had the virus under control.

The country's Vice Premier Sun Chunlan repeated calls for a "people's war" on the disease. "There must be a 24-hour shift pattern. During the wartime condition, there must be no deserters, otherwise they will be forever nailed onto the pillar of historical shame," Ms Sun said, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

The national health crisis poses a massive challenge to President Xi, and the doctor’s death throws a wrench in his plan to build a system that offers social and economic security for those that bow to authoritarianism.

Still, Beijing appears to understand that they must address Mr Li’s death and the ensuing rush of emotion from the country of 1.4 billion.

China has said it will dispatch a team to investigate the circumstances of Mr Li’s arrest and death, but many remain dissatisfied by the response.

"Why did they start the investigation only after he died?" commented one person online. "We already knew that he was wronged for a long time, but why didn't he receive any apologies before he closed his eyes?"