But now many Chinese people are furious that the doctors were ever chastised for telling the truth and that no state newspaper even reported the outbreak at its beginnings, while it might still have been stopped. On Friday, WeChat, Weibo and other Chinese social media platforms exploded with anger and grief over news that one of the doctors, 34-year-old Li Wenliang, had died after being infected.

This coronavirus surfaced just in time for the Lunar New Year holiday, a beloved traditional celebration for many people and a grand occasion for propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party. Even as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was raising its internal threat level warning and bracing for the coming epidemic, the front page of the People’s Daily showed the nation’s leader shaking hands with other nations’ leaders.

While the epidemic was spreading through Wuhan, one of the city’s official newspapers ran a feel-good feature about a holiday potluck banquet with more than 40,000 families. (Many of those people are now ill.) A week after Wuhan was locked down, the People’s Daily was touting the superiority of the Chinese model.

So the coronavirus got the silent treatment from the government? Standard procedure. The government’s favorite way of ending problems in China these days isn’t to solve them; it’s to get the people to stop caring. Only, the people do care.

Censorship can’t stop an epidemic, it turns out. Who knew.

And now the people are seething over the information blackout — and pointing fingers at their local officials. Local officials who, as the outbreak worsened, appeared to be making every effort to do nothing.