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Li Wenliang (Chinese: 李文亮; 12 October 1986 – 7 February 2020) was a Chinese ophthalmologist who worked at Wuhan Central Hospital.[2] On 30 December 2019, Wuhan CDC issued emergency warnings to local hospitals about a number of mysterious pneumonia cases discovered in the city in the previous week.[3][4] On the same day, Li received an internal diagnostic report of a suspected severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) patient from other doctors which he in turn shared with his friends. He was dubbed a whistleblower when that shared report later circulated publicly despite him requesting confidentiality from those he shared the information with.[5][6] Rumors of a deadly SARS outbreak subsequently spread on Chinese social media platforms, and Wuhan police summoned and admonished him for "making false comments on the Internet about unconfirmed SARS outbreak".[5][7]
The outbreak was later confirmed not to be SARS but a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Li returned to work and later contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, from a patient who was not known to be infected. He died from the disease on 7 February 2020, at age 33.[8][9] A subsequent Chinese official inquiry exonerated him, and the Communist Party of China formally offered a "solemn apology" to his family and revoked the admonishment of him.[10][11][12] By early June 2020, five more doctors from the Wuhan hospital, since nicknamed the "whistleblower hospital", had died from COVID-19.[13]
