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We absolutely assume that the reported cases are an underestimate Dr. Anne Schuchat, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In China, people are told only whatever the Ministry of Public Security allows them to be told. A recent analysis by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China found that only 536 foreign journalists are accredited to work in China, but whatever facts they’re capable of reporting about the crisis will not be readily available to Chinese people, if at all. Among the online news sites blocked by China’s state censors are the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Economist, NBC News, Time, the Hong Kong Free Press, South China Morning Post, and so on. Also banned: Google, Human Rights Watch, Twitter, Facebook, Amnesty International, and on and on.

That’s why, after the Chinese government was finally forced to admit that there was a strange flu-like ailment killing people in Wuhan, it fell to courageous citizen journalists like Chen Qiushi, a former human rights lawyer, to try to tell the Chinese public what was actually going on. Chen had made a name for himself last year after he travelled to Hong Kong to report on the mass pro-democracy uprising there. Although Chen’s social media accounts were soon deleted and all his reports from Hong Kong were scrubbed from the internet, he somehow evaded imprisonment. But his luck ran out last Thursday in Wuhan.

Photo by Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

Chen arrived on the last train in, just before the city of 11 million people was locked down on Jan. 24. He was regularly posting reports and videos on social media — front-line accounts from overflowing hospitals and morgues — until last Thursday. He was first to report that cab drivers in Wuhan were already aware as early as mid-December that some unmentionable malady was killing people in the city, and medical practitioners were dying from it.