Not wearing masks to protect against coronavirus is a ‘big mistake,’ top Chinese scientist says

Chinese scientists at the front of that country’s outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have not been particularly accessible to foreign media. Many have been overwhelmed trying to understand their epidemic and combat it, and responding to media requests, especially from journalists outside of China, has not been a top priority.

Science has tried to interview George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for 2 months. Last week he responded.

Gao oversees 2000 employees—one-fifth the staff size of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and he remains an active researcher himself. In January, he was part of a team that did the first isolation and sequencing of severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. He co-authored two widely read papers published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that provided some of the first detailed epidemiology and clinical features of the disease, and has published three more papers on COVID-19 in The Lancet.

His team also provided important data to a joint commission between Chinese researchers and a team of international scientists, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO), that wrote a landmark report after touring the country to understand the response to the epidemic.

First trained as a veterinarian, Gao later earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Oxford and did postdocs there and at Harvard University, specializing in immunology and virology. His research specializes in viruses that have fragile lipid membranes called envelopes—a group that includes SARS-CoV-2—and how they enter cells and also move between species.

Gao answered Science’s questions over several days via text, voicemails, and phone conversations. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: What can other countries learn from the way China has approached COVID-19?

A: Social distancing is the essential strategy for the control of any infectious diseases, especially if they are respiratory infections. First, we used “nonpharmaceutical strategies,” because you don’t have any specific inhibitors or drugs and you don’t have any vaccines. Second, you have to make sure you isolate any cases. Third, close contacts should be in quarantine: We spend a lot of time trying to find all these close contacts, and to make sure they are quarantined and isolated. Fourth, suspend public gatherings. Fifth, restrict movement, which is why you have a lockdown, the cordon sanitaire in French.

Q: The lockdown in China began on 23 January in Wuhan and was expanded to neighboring cities in Hubei province. Other provinces in China had less restrictive shutdowns. How was all of this coordinated, and how important were the “supervisors” overseeing the efforts in neighborhoods?

A: You have to have understanding and consensus. For that you need very strong leadership, at the local and national level. You need a supervisor and coordinator working with the public very closely. Supervisors need to know who the close contacts are, who the suspected cases are. The supervisors in the community must be very alert. They are key.

Q: What mistakes are other countries making?

A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.

Q: What about other control measures? China has made aggressive use of thermometers at the entrances to stores, buildings, and public transportation stations, for instance.

A: Yes. Anywhere you go inside in China, there are thermometers. You have to try to take people’s temperatures as often as you can to make sure that whoever has a high fever stays out.

And a really important outstanding question is how stable this virus is in the environment. Because it’s an enveloped virus, people think it’s fragile and particularly sensitive to surface temperature or humidity. But from both U.S. results and Chinese studies, it looks like it’s very resistant to destruction on some surfaces. It may be able to survive in many environments. We need to have science-based answers here.

Q: People who tested positive in Wuhan but only had mild disease were sent into isolation in large facilities and were not allowed to have visits from family. Is this something other countries should consider?

A: Infected people must be isolated. That should happen everywhere. You can only control COVID-19 if you can remove the source of the infection. This is why we built module hospitals and transformed stadiums into hospitals.

Q: There are many questions about the origin of the outbreak in China. Chinese researchers have reported that the earliest case dates back to 1 December 2019. What do you think of the report in the South China Morning Post that says data from the Chinese government show there were cases in November 2019, with the first one on 17 November?

A: There is no solid evidence to say we already had clusters in November. We are trying to better understand the origin.

Q: Wuhan health officials linked a large cluster of cases to the Huanan seafood market and closed it on 1 January. The assumption was that a virus had jumped to humans from an animal sold and possibly butchered at the market. But in your paper in NEJM, which included a retrospective look for cases, you reported that four of the five earliest infected people had no links to the seafood market. Do you think the seafood market was a likely place of origin, or is it a distraction—an amplifying factor but not the original source?

A: That’s a very good question. You are working like a detective. From the very beginning, everybody thought the origin was the market. Now, I think the market could be the initial place, or it could be a place where the virus was amplified. So that’s a scientific question. There are two possibilities.

Q: China was also criticized for not sharing the viral sequence immediately. The story about a new coronavirus came out in The Wall Street Journal on 8 January; it didn’t come from Chinese government scientists. Why not?

A: That was a very good guess from The Wall Street Journal. WHO was informed about the sequence, and I think the time between the article appearing and the official sharing of the sequence was maybe a few hours. I don’t think it’s more than a day.

Q: But a public database of viral sequences later showed that the first one was submitted by Chinese researchers on 5 January. So there were at least 3 days that you must have known that there was a new coronavirus. It’s not going to change the course of the epidemic now, but to be honest, something happened about reporting the sequence publicly.

A: I don’t think so. We shared the information with scientific colleagues promptly, but this involved public health and we had to wait for policymakers to announce it publicly. You don’t want the public to panic, right? And no one in any country could have predicted that the virus would cause a pandemic. This is the first noninfluenza pandemic ever.

"Infected people must be isolated. That should happen everywhere."

George Gao, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention

Q: It wasn’t until 20 January that Chinese scientists officially said there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. Why do you think epidemiologists in China had so much difficulty seeing that it was occurring?

A: Detailed epidemiological data were not available yet. And we were facing a very crazy and concealed virus from the very beginning. The same is true in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and the United States: From the very beginning scientists, everybody thought: “Well, it’s just a virus.”

Q: Spread in China has dwindled to a crawl, and the new confirmed cases are mainly people entering the country, correct?

A: Yes. At the moment, we don’t have any local transmission, but the problem for China now is the imported cases. So many infected travelers are coming into China.

Q: But what will happen when China returns to normal? Do you think enough people have become infected so that herd immunity will keep the virus at bay?

A: We definitely don’t have herd immunity yet. But we are waiting for more definitive results from antibody tests that can tell us how many people really have been infected.

Q: So what is the strategy now? Buying time to find effective medicines?

A: Yes—our scientists are working on both vaccines and drugs.

Q: Many scientists consider remdesivir to be the most promising drug now being tested. When do you think clinical trials in China of the drug will have data?

A: In April.

Q: Have Chinese scientists developed animal models that you think are robust enough to study pathogenesis and test drugs and vaccines?

A: At the moment, we are using both monkeys and transgenic mice that have ACE2, the human receptor for the virus. The mouse model is widely used in China for drug and vaccine assessment, and I think there are at least a couple papers coming out about the monkey models soon. I can tell you that our monkey model works.

Q: What do you think of President Donald Trump referring to the new coronavirus as the “China virus” or the “Chinese virus”?

A: It’s definitely not good to call it the Chinese virus. The virus belongs to the Earth. The virus is our common enemy—not the enemy of any person or country.

Jon Cohen
Jon is a staff writer for Science.

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The secret history of Monopoly: the capitalist board game’s leftwing origins

‘Hepeating‘ might be a new word, but the concept it represents is tried and tested. Woman comes up with great idea. Man takes it and passes it off as his own. Man receives great acclaim. Woman doesn’t make a fuss. Add in a dinner party ending in a broken friendship, a courtroom revelation, and escaping prisoners of war, and you have the story of one of the world’s most popular board games, Monopoly.

In 1903, a leftwing feminist called Lizzy Magie patented the board game that we now know as Monopoly – but she never gets the credit. Now a new book aims to put that right.

One night in late 1932, a Philadelphia businessman named Charles Todd and his wife, Olive, introduced their friends Charles and Esther Darrow to a real-estate board game they had recently learned. As the two couples sat around the board, enthusiastically rolling the dice, buying up properties and moving their tokens around, the Todds were pleased to note that the Darrows liked the game. In fact, they were so taken with it that Charles Todd made them a set of their own, and began teaching them some of the more advanced rules. The game didn’t have an official name: it wasn’t sold in a box, but passed from friend to friend. But everybody called it ‘the monopoly game’.

Together with other friends, they played many times. One day, despite all of his exposure to the game, Darrow – who was unemployed, and desperate for money to support his family – asked Charles Todd for a written copy of the rules. Todd was slightly perplexed, as he had never written them up. Nor did it appear that written rules existed elsewhere.

In fact, the rules to the game had been invented in Washington DC in 1903 by a bold, progressive woman named Elizabeth Magie. But her place in the game’s folk history was lost for decades and ceded to the man who had picked it up at his friend’s house: Charles Darrow. Today, Magie’s story can be told in full. But even though much of the story has been around for 40 years, the Charles Darrow myth persists as an inspirational parable of American innovation – thanks in no small part to Monopoly’s publisher and the man himself. After he sold a version of the game to Parker Brothers and it became a phenomenal success, eventually making him millions, one journalist after another asked him how he had managed to invent Monopoly out of thin air – a seeming sleight of hand that had brought joy into so many households. “It’s a freak,” Darrow told the Germantown Bulletin, a Philadelphia paper. “Entirely unexpected and illogical.”

To Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, the problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman working as a stenographer stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.

Night after night, after her work at her office was done, Lizzie sat in her home, drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking. It was the early 1900s, and she wanted her board game to reflect her progressive political views – that was the whole point of it.

The descendant of Scottish immigrants, Lizzie had pale skin, a strong jawline and a strong work ethic. She was then unmarried, unusual for a woman of her age at the time. Even more unusual, however, was the fact that she was the head of her household. Completely on her own, she had saved up for and bought her home, along with several acres of property.

By Drawing for a Game Board, 01/05/1904. This is the printed patent drawing for a game board invented by Lizzie J. Magie. From the U.S. National Archives. Public domain.

She lived in Prince George’s county, a Washington DC neighbourhood where the residents on her block included a dairyman, a peddler who identified himself as a “huckster”, a sailor, a carpenter and a musician. Lizzie shared her house with a male actor who paid rent, and a black female servant. She was also intensely political, teaching classes about her political beliefs in the evenings after work. But she wasn’t reaching enough people. She needed a new medium – something more interactive and creative.

There was one obvious outlet. At the turn of the 20th century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication. And so Lizzie set to work.

She began speaking in public about a new concept of hers, which she called the Landlord’s Game. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” she wrote in a political magazine. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life’, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem[s] to have, ie, the accumulation of wealth.”

Lizzie’s game featured play money and deeds and properties that could be bought and sold. Players borrowed money, either from the bank or from each other, and they had to pay taxes. And it featured a path that allowed players to circle the board – in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and an homage to Lizzie’s political hero, the economist Henry George, whose ideas about putting the burden of taxation on wealthy landowners inspired the game: “Labor upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: GO TO JAIL.

Lizzie drew nine rectangular spaces along the edges of the board between each set of corners. In the centre of each nine-space grouping was a railroad, with spaces for rent or sale on either side. Absolute Necessity rectangles offered goods like bread and shelter, and Franchise spaces offered services such as water and light. As gamers made their way around the board, they performed labour and earned wages. Every time players passed the Mother Earth space, they were “supposed to have performed so much labor upon Mother Earth” that they received $100 in wages. Players who ran out of money were sent to the Poor House.

Players who trespassed on land were sent to Jail, and there the unfortunate individuals had to linger until serving out their time or paying a $50 fine. Serving out their time meant waiting until they threw a double. “The rallying and chaffing of the others when one player finds himself an inmate of the jail, and the expressions of mock sympathy and condolence when one is obliged to betake himself to the poor house, make a large part of the fun and merriment of the game,” Lizzie said.

From its inception, the Landlord’s Game aimed to seize on the natural human instinct to compete. And, somewhat surprisingly, Lizzie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her vision was an embrace of dualism and contained a contradiction within itself, a tension trying to be resolved between opposing philosophies. However, and of course unbeknownst to Lizzie at the time, it was the monopolist rules that would later capture the public’s imagination.

After years of tinkering, writing and pondering her new creation, Lizzie entered the US Patent Office on 23 March 1903 to secure her legal claim to the Landlord’s Game. At least two years later, she published a version of the game through the Economic Game Company, a New York–based firm that counted Lizzie as a part-owner. The game became popular with leftwing intellectuals and on college campuses, and that popularity spread throughout the next three decades; it eventually caught on with a community of Quakers in Atlantic City, who customised it with the names of local neighbourhoods, and from there it found its way to Charles Darrow.

"In total, the game that Darrow brought to Parker Brothers has now sold hundreds of millions copies worldwide, and he received royalties throughout his life."

Lizzie was paid by Parker Brothers, too. When the game started to take off in the mid-1930s, the company bought up the rights to other related games to preserve its territory. For the patent to the Landlord’s Game and two other game ideas, Lizzie reportedly received $500 — and no royalties.

At first, Lizzie did not suspect the true motives for the purchase of her game. When a prototype of Parker Brothers’ version of the Landlord’s Game arrived at her home in Arlington, she was delighted. In a letter to Foster Parker, nephew of George and the company’s treasurer, she wrote that there had been “a song in my heart” ever since the game had arrived. “Some day, I hope,” she went on, “you will publish other games of mine, but I don’t think any one of them will be as much trouble to you or as important to me as this one, and I’m sure I wouldn’t make so much fuss over them.”

Eventually, though, the truth dawned on her – and she became publicly angry. In January of 1936 she gave interviews to the Washington Post and the Washington Evening Star. In a picture accompanying the Evening Star piece, she held up game boards from the Landlord’s Game and another game that had the word MONOPOLY written across its center four times in bold black letters; on the table in front of her was the now-familiar “Darrow” board, fresh out of the Parker Brothers box. The image of Lizzie painted by the reporter couldn’t have been clearer. She was angry, hurt and in search of revenge against a company that she felt had stolen her now-best-selling idea. Parker Brothers might have the rights to her 1924-patented Landlord’s Game, but they didn’t tell the story of her game invention dating back to 1904 or that the game had been in the public domain for decades. She had invented the game, and she could prove it.

The Evening Star reporter wrote that Lizzie’s game “did not get the popular hold it has today. It took Charles B Darrow, a Philadelphia engineer, who retrieved the game from the oblivion of the Patent Office and dressed it up a bit, to get it going. Last August a large firm manufacturing games took over his improvements. In November, Mrs Phillips [Magie, who had by now married] sold the company her patent rights.

“It went over with a bang. But not for Mrs Phillips … Probably, if one counts the lawyers’, printers’ and Patent Office fees used up in developing it, the game has cost her more than she made from it.” As she told the Washington Post in a story that ran the same day: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

It was to little avail. Much to Lizzie’s dismay, the other two games that she invented for Parker Brothers, King’s Men and Bargain Day, received little publicity and faded into board-game obscurity. The newer, Parker Brothers version of the Landlord’s Game appeared to have done so as well. And so did Lizzie Magie. She died in 1948, a widow with no children, whose obituary and headstone made no mention of her game invention. One of her last jobs was at the US Office of Education, where her colleagues knew her only as an elderly typist who talked about inventing games.

As Charles Darrow reaped the rewards of the game’s success, Lizzie Magie’s role in the invention of Monopoly remained obscure. But in 1973, Ralph Anspach, a leftwing academic who was under legal attack from Parker Brothers over his creation of an Anti-Monopoly game, learned her story as he researched his case, seeking to undermine the company’s hold on the intellectual property. The case lasted a decade, but in the end, Anspach prevailed, in the process putting Magie’s vital role in the game’s history beyond dispute – and building up an extraordinary archive of material, which forms the backbone of this account.

But Hasbro, the company of which Parker Brothers is now a subsidiary, still downplays Magie’s status, responding to a request for comment with a terse statement: “Hasbro credits the official Monopoly game produced and played today to Charles Darrow.” And even in 2015, on Hasbro’s website, a timeline of the game’s history begins in 1935. Over the years, the carefully worded corporate retellings have been most illuminating in what they don’t mention: Lizzie Magie, the Quakers, the dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of early players, Ralph Anspach and the Anti-Monopoly litigation. Perhaps the care and keeping of secrets, as well as truths, can define us.

And so the beloved Darrow legend lives on. It only makes sense. The Darrow myth is a “nice, clean, well-structured example of the Eureka School of American industrial legend,” the New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin wrote in 1978. “If Darrow invented the story rather than the game, he may still deserve to have a plaque on the Boardwalk honoring his ingenuity.” It’s hard not to wonder how many other unearthed histories are still out there –stories belonging to lost Lizzie Magies who quietly chip away at creating pieces of the world, their contributions so seamless that few of us ever stop to think about their origins. Commonly held beliefs don’t always stand up to scrutiny, but perhaps the real question is why we cling to them in the first place, failing to question their veracity and ignoring contradicting realities once they surface.

Above all, the Monopoly case opens the question of who should get credit for an invention, and how. Most people know about the Wright brothers – who filed their patent on the same day as Lizzie Magie – but don’t recall the other aviators who also sought to fly. The adage that success has many fathers, but we remember only one, rings true – to say nothing of success’s mothers. Everyone who has ever played Monopoly, even today, has added to its remarkable endurance and, on some level, made it their own. Games aren’t just relics of their makers – their history is also told through their players. And like Lizzie’s original innovative board, circular and never-ending, the balance between winners and losers is constantly in flux.

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What to Watch, Listen to, and Read While Coronavirus Self-Quarantining

Now is the time to stay inside as much as possible and do your part to flatten the curve, yet it’s equally important to give yourself a break from the news. Here are some suggestions from New Yorker writers and artists to ease the stress of isolation.

Television

Each year, Emily Nussbaum wildly fails at selecting just ten television shows for her not-top-ten list. Here are three selections from 2019:

“Dickinson” (Apple TV+)—A dreamy show about weirdos, for weirdos. The premise is that Emily Dickinson speaks in modern teen-age patois, scored to Billie Eilish. It sounded gimmicky, but, a few episodes in, this stoned, surprising début got under my skin.

“BoJack Horseman” (Netflix)—The sharpest response to #MeToo on television, a satirical interrogation of antihero art, and also a rich meditation on addiction (to everything, including TV).

“Couples Therapy” (Showtime)—Reality show or horror movie? Either way, there was something riveting about this peek into other people’s marriages, especially the sessions with the manipulative narcissist who made me fantasize about performing a citizen’s divorce.

Troy Patterson’s thematic list of the best in television nominated John Mulaney as class clown. Check out his recent spin on “Saturday Night Live.” And, according to Troy, there are really no further excuses not to watch “Succession” (HBO). Doreen St. Félix doesn’t think “The Goop Lab” (Netflix) is a great show, but it’s worth streaming to further savor her surgical takedown of the “magical thinking” that powers the Goop brand.

Movies

Richard Brody is also a prodigious listmaker. His “Twenty-Seven Best Movies of the Decade” reaches to all corners of the cinema. Here are five films from American directors (that should be easy to find on streaming services) to get started:

“Somewhere,” 2010, Sofia Coppola

“Margaret,” 2011, Kenneth Lonergan

“An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” 2013, Terence Nance

“The Wolf of Wall Street,” 2013, Martin Scorsese

“Red Hook Summer,” 2012, Spike Lee

Brody also has a Facebook movie group where he is recommending new films to watch.

“He dreamed, drew, pondered, probed, and agonized on film, and what resulted, more often than not, bore the grip of a thriller and the elegance of a waltz,” Anthony Lane wrote about the “immortal world” of Ingmar Bergman for the Swedish filmmaker’s centennial, in 2018. There is really no wrong place to start watching—perhaps “Cries and Whispers”—since, as Lane points out, “all these movies pass each other in orbit, sometimes decades apart. The more of them you observe, in wonder, the greater their gravitational pull.”

Podcasts

Sarah Larson’s best podcast list from 2019 contains many gems. (Please, please listen to Season 2 of “In the Dark” if you have not already.) One of her less well-known picks is this series from the BBC:

“Tunnel 29” tells the story of Joachim Rudolph, who, in 1961 and 1962, as a young engineering student, dug a tunnel between West and East Berlin and helped twenty-nine people escape Communist East Germany. The smartly structured, elegantly written series, narrated and produced by Helena Merriman, makes use of several strengths, among them evocative sound design, uncommonly naturalistic audio acting, and extraordinary footage from the tunnel escape itself. Merriman’s evocation of the night the Berlin Wall went up is particularly stunning—houses divided in half, families on opposite sides.

Books

Katy Waldman’s best book list of 2019 had ten selections, including “Trust Exercise,” by Susan Choi, who was once a fact checker at The New Yorker. Here is Waldman’s recommendation of the novel:

Sarah and David, teen-agers at a prestigious performing-arts high school, conduct their love affair under the watch of a manipulative and charismatic drama teacher. The students are all sweat, hormones, and painful self-consciousness. The novel, tense and lovely as a dancer’s clenched muscle, explodes into a mid-act twist, which brilliantly foregrounds questions of authorship and appropriation.

Back in 2016, Vinson Cunningham took a long train ride with Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets”:

Sometime in June I took an Amtrak from Penn Station to Rochester, New York. The ride takes seven river-guided hours: north along the Hudson, then west on the Mohawk, and between naps and tepid attempts to write, I read Maggie Nelson’s slight, beautiful “Bluets.” I think of summer reading, I guess, as slow and playful, and the form of “Bluets”—a series of numbered paragraphs, some connected explicitly to the book’s several narrative strands, some almost totally epigrammatic—fits these criteria perfectly. My eye flitted between the numbers on each page, dragging me happily ahead and behind of what was, for me, the “present” of the text. (At one point, sort of restless, I started reading backward from the end. It was fun.) “Bluets” is one of those books that I’d been meaning to get to for a while, but when I finished it I didn’t regret having come to it late. What Nelson describes so excruciatingly well in its pages—love, helplessness, horniness, loss, obsession, fear; the act of writing, and of arranging, as a salve for these conditions, and more—is stuff that only experience can bring, and which only distance can help make coherent. The book offers and asks for something like wisdom. I almost wished I’d waited another decade to pick it up, but I guess I can read it again.

On the Internet

The archive of the Berlin Philharmonic is free right now. (Alex Ross wrote about classical concerts without audiences.)

The author and illustrator Mo Willems has been doodling at lunch for kids.

If you need some innocuous and pleasant headphone music for working and relaxing, try the wildly popular YouTube channel run by Chillhop Music.

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'I'm in the safest place in the world'

Italian hermit living alone on an island says self-isolation is the ultimate journey.

For more than 30 years, Mauro Morandi has been the sole inhabitant of a beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea. For the past few weeks his hermit's hut has been an aptly isolated location from which to watch the global coronavirus crisis unfold.

And, after being alone with his own thoughts for so much of his life, he's got some insight into the isolation that many of us now face in the weeks and months ahead.

Morandi, a former teacher, arrived on the island of Budelli, off the coast of Sardinia, by accident while attempting to sail from Italy to Polynesia 31 years ago. He fell in love with the pristine atoll's crystal-clear waters, coral sands and beautiful sunsets -- and decided to stay.

He took over from the previous caretaker shortly afterward and, at the age of 81, he's still there, having earned himself a reputation as Italy's Robinson Crusoe.

Each night he sleeps in an old stone cottage and wakes up in the morning surrounded by mother nature. He enjoys exploring shrubs and cliffs and talks to birds at breakfast as they fly in and out of his little kitchen window.

He keeps up with the news though, learning first of mainland Italy's shutdown against the spread of coronavirus, and then the rest of the world's.

In his solitary world, he says he currently feels like he's in the "safest place on Earth." He's also eager to share a few tips on how to best face self-isolation.

"I am fine, I'm not scared," he tells CNN Travel via the mobile phone that is his link to the outside world. "I feel safe here. This island offers total protection. No risks at all. Nobody lands, not even a single boat can be seen sailing by."

Like many of us, Morandi's main concern is for the wellbeing of his family and friends -- in his case living in northern Italy's Modena, one of the most virus-hit areas in Italy. "They're facing tough times," he says.

Little has changed for Morandi since Italy's virus outbreak, except that he must now wait longer for people to bring him food from the mainland due to harsh restrictions imposed by Rome's government.

These have meant that even the sporadic visits from tourists during the winter have ceased. Over the years he's become accustomed to daytrippers, befriending them and sometimes sharing his meals with them.

Left alone, he spends the day admiring the sea, inhaling the pure air, collecting wood, preparing his meals and -- of course -- posting on Instagram.

"I get bored, so I kill time taking photos of the beaches, the wildlife and scenery, editing shots and then sharing these on social media and Instagram," he says. "I have a lot of followers."

The wild-bearded sea dog thinks the virus shutdown, if it continues, means tourists will be staying away at least until July, but the prospect of a quieter summer doesn't scare him.

Morandi has a few tips for people now forced into solitude in Italy and elsewhere by the pandemic. He says a few weeks holed up inside is nothing to get upset about but is instead an opportunity to practice some soul s"I read a lot, and think. I think many people are scared of reading because if they do, they'll start meditating and thinking about stuff, and that can be dangerous.

"If you start seeing things under a different light and be critical, you could end up seeing what a miserable life you lead or what a bad person you are or the bad things you did."

This introspection can, he says, ultimately be highly rewarding. Morandi recounts his own transformation from an inveterate wanderer who traveled across Europe each year to a solitary islander.

"I just didn't feel like traveling anymore -- no interest," he says. "I understood that the most beautiful, dangerous, adventurous and gratifying journeys of all is the one inside yourself, whether you're sitting in the living room or under a canopy here in Budelli. That's why staying at home and doing nothing can be really hard for many."

But, he adds: "I never feel alone." 

In Morandi's view, most people don't want to be alone because they can't stand their own company and the imposed shutdown is forcing many to face this.

And, he says, while the current crisis presents an opportunity to re-evaluate their lives, he doesn't think that many will make the most of it.

"I don't believe in the healing power of people to change," he says. "Perhaps some individuals will, but the majority are too accustomed to comforts and frenetic lifestyles."

Meanwhile, time flows by as usual on Budelli.

Winter this year has been milder, with spring-like temperatures and warm suns. The island's habitat remains quite untouched. No pollution. Clear fluorescent turquoise waters, lush wild vegetation, purplish rocks resembling natural sculptures and healthy air.

"My cat died just the other day, she was 20 years old," Morandi says. "Perhaps this climate does bring longevity."

Budelli is one of the most beautiful islands in the entire Mediterranean. Dating back to prehistoric times when the Earth's crust was still forming, legend says it's a shard of the mythical, lost Atlantis continent swallowed by the ocean.

But the island isn't completely immune to climate change and nature's destruction by man, says Morandi.

Not long ago a clear line of pinkish sand cut along the shore, made of bright pink, orange and salmon-tinted crushed coral, crystals, fossils and dead marine creatures, giving the shore a sparkling strawberry hue similar to that of sunset skies.

"Now the pink is almost gone, hard to see," he says. "The directions of the winds blowing over Budelli have changed, the pinkish sand no longer piles up as it used to."

The mayhem on mainland Italy is allowing Budelli's caretaker to buy time over his own fate.

Ownership of the island has changed several times over the last few years. Since 2016, Budelli has been a government-owned national park, rendering Morandi's role obsolete -- a situation he has fought while continuing to live there.

The virus emergency is likely to postpone any decision over his future for the time being, though his ramshackle home is in need of a restyle.

"For now I've got everything I need. There's electricity, even if it needs a makeover, and running water, and an extra small stove for heating."

Nothing to complain about.

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The Orientals and their ancient sexual education

It is funny. Human behavior analysts always use some unconvincing argument to explain why the human being, when limited on one side, falls on the other.

"It is your unconscious looking for an escape from something that limits you and that you have not yet accepted".

I never got along with my analysts. However, there is some reason in what they say, after all they study for years precisely to show us a way, a different view of our cognitive obscurity. I, I confess, also have a predilection to observe human behavior. It's amazing what you discover. Good, but let's get to the facts. I already knew that the Japanese - the Japanese in particular - are very naughty. But the Chinese surprised me with the story that they pay a penny for erotic toys of all types, brands, sizes and colors. Brazilians take care. 

I read a news story about the Shanghai International Adult Toy Fair, something like the Erótica Fair, held in New York I found out that the adult sex and leisure market in China is an increasingly profitable and booming business, collecting around 38 billion yuan ($ 5 billion). All of this financial movement, experts say, has helped to break some taboos of the frowning Chinese society. It is the power of money. 

The idea that we do here in New York is that China only produces that pile of junk of R $ 1.99, toys that break before Christmas is over and a pile of silk that tears in the first wash. Nananinananão. They like sex. And a lot of sex. And I hear about it on the eve of my vacation. Jeez temptation !!!! Like the Japanese, the Chinese are accused of having the small “toy”. 

I think this justifies the growing market for products to warm up, let's say, the relationship. And they are right. I had a nasty boyfriend, who made up for his poor erection with beautiful oral sex very well. Life is like that, smart is someone who knows how to make compensations. The Chinese show that they are like that too. If the toy is small, they fill the bed with so many other toys that just make their partner crazy. 

Among oils and stimulants, lingerie, whips, masks and a vast collection of vibrators, what woman will remember the size of the boy's bigulinho? Stop everything, right? Not to mention the erotic films. Definitely, size is not a document. One of the attractions of this fair was a collection of 300 historical objects, including 18th century Chinese erotic designs and, amazingly, vibrators from more than 200 years old. I wonder what a vibrator would have been like two centuries ago. 

Oh, and look at the revelation, the Chinese enjoy a male lingerie. I remember when I was in Amsterdam and, in that delightful den of sex that is that city, I saw, among rubber chicks that sprang with springs in the window of a store, an elephant underwear. With eyes filled with emotion, I entered the store and m p o l g a d i s s with the “novelty” (for me it was, right?). 

I thought everything was good, wonderful and I was already imagining my face making the elephant's trunk go up and down ... I had already bought some boxer shorts in the Tie Rack in London for the cute, but they didn’t reach that wild underwear. There was a banana, carrot, revolver, but I really liked the little elephant, with trunk and ears. For me, I bought a sexy red nightgown, short and with plumes on the collar and on the bow ties. Arriving in Brazil, crazy for a night like that to kill the nostalgia, we went to the motel. I put on my new sexy outfit and gave the gift to my boyfriend. He looked, looked ... "What is that?" He asked. 

"Why, a pair of underwear, to warm up our night." Holy innocence, Batman !!!! Where I had my head in thinking that it could spice up some kind of sex. Every time that trunk moved, it was a fit of laughter."

I was sick of laughing. He, poor thing, until he held himself a little. I should have thought I was a little strange when I got the gift, but I must have thought that "it was a woman's thing". Even today, when I remember that trunk agonizing to stay upright, in the midst of so much laughter, I can't help laughing. So, this is the problem with some of these toys. They can really become a toy and you can stay in bed as if you were with your brother. Playing, playing ... It's like those abominable dices of positions. Who never had one of that ??? 

I had it, it came in the bag on a trip I made to Argentina. I entered a sex shop, removing the vibrators, the store was full of lingerie with unbelievable bad taste. Escolated that I was after that damn little elephant, I just bought a little dummy. Guess what??? Damn, I had a position there that I didn't even see in the Kama Sutra. It will pick up. 

Once again, my sex went downhill - literally. I almost hung myself with my own leg. Daddy never again. The tip is, think carefully before buying an erotic prop. It can become a joke in bed and you can stay in hand. And, between us, I wonder if this Chinese excitement in the production of erotic material arrives in Brazil, safety precautions must be redoubled. 

Otherwise, it will be like the joke of the old lady who bought a vibrator and ended up in the emergency room for not being able to get that phallic object out of the said “user”. The old lady moaned, moaned like crazy. The nurses, after some effort and dismayed, took off the vibrator. The old woman screamed loudly, fought. They, imagining that they had hurt her, apologized. The old lady, very angry, ordered: "And don't delay to change the batteries, otherwise I'll cut you in half with the scalpel !!!". 

Yeah, the joke may be weak, but sex without fun does not happen. Even if there are no toys around, humor has to be one of the basic ingredients. Adding more doses full of lust, affection and good footprints, nothing is comparable.

Carol Mercedes
Pink Hot Publisher / United Photo Press Magazine
www.unitedphotopressworld.org

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BC - AC (Before Covid & After Covid)

Lourenço Thomaz

Let us not have a doubt that the world will be completely different after this pandemic, that is what happened with 9/11. But this time the changes will be for the benefit of people and their quality of life, because the world and our profession will have to “stop” for a while, will have to rest a little and live at a more appropriate speed, where people people will give more importance and priority to what is really relevant to them.

We were all living at a schizophrenic pace where none of us stopped to think about what is really essential. Unrestrained speed in our life, in our work, in our travels, in our daily lives, in the deadlines that were imposed on us, and as if that were not enough, in those that we impose and demand of ourselves.

If we make a parallel with the world of advertising and communication I think the same will happen, in fact it was already timidly happening. And this virus will make that change happen faster.

The brands, agencies and all the agents in this market were already starting to take a moment to think about their purpose and what they could do that was relevant to people. This pandemic will only accelerate this process, which will be positive. We will stop (I hope) working at an unbridled speed, we will stop living just to beat the previous month / year history, we will stop working with mind-blowing deadlines and faster answers than the questions themselves. We will, once and for all, work with our feet and head, with the right time, looking for answers for people and for our businesses. We will increasingly focus on the purpose of our business and the essentials.

Due to physical and ecological necessity, this process was already taking place but not in such an abrupt way, it would probably be a lengthy process. And as with all types of ‘crises’ there are always opportunities to improve as people and as professionals. This will be no different. But, this whole process (as a matter of fact, as a solution to this pandemic) depends on us, on all of us together, working with the same objective.

"Now is the time for social isolation, which in my opinion is a great opportunity to stop, analyze and define the future strategy, so that when we return to our life (which will no longer be the same) we return with more discernment, and then it will be time to come together in our goals, and in what really matters in our life, in the life of our companies, in the life of the brands we work and which we are part of."

Change is always frightening because it is always uncertain, but this change is not only necessary, it is our only chance. It is the only chance for agencies in Portugal to be at the level of the best agencies out there, it is the only chance for Portuguese producers to be so good with the best in the world, etc.

As my partner Tomás Froes says, “if we have the best player in the world, if we have the best coach in the world, if our team is a European champion, etc., why shouldn't we be the best in the world at all?”

The truth is that we can be and there is no excuse for not being one. If we want, the AC will be better than the BC.

Lourenço Thomaz

Founding partner and CCO of Partners

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Coronavirus Precautions: Can You Get COVID-19 From Having Sex or Kissing Your Partner? Here’s What You Should Know

Novel Coronavirus, the name has created scare and panic among individuals across the globe. After its first outbreak in Wuhan, China, latest report states the death toll from COVID-19 has crossed 3,000 worldwide, as cases in Italy and Iran continue to worsen and dozens of countries reported their first victims of the illness from the virus. 

The panic about the novel Coronavirus has been running rampant, ever since the outbreak made headlines last year. The search for precautionary measures to avoid getting infected has increased. People continue to look for answers on how they can protect themselves from the deadly virus. Not only if wearing masks could prevent them from getting the infection, but individuals also seek intimate queries. Can you get Coronavirus from kissing your partner? Or if you have sex, will you be infectious to the virus? With the COVID-19 raging across the globe, here is what you should know. US Confirms First Coronavirus Death, Patient Infected With COVID-19 Virus in Washington Dies. 

Google recently revealed the top questions that people have been asking about the deadly virus. Aside from what are the symptoms and if there is any cure to the infection, people were also curious to know if they can catch the virus from kissing or having sex with their partner.

Can You Get Coronavirus From Kissing Your Partner or Having Sex?

The latest report states that France is warning people to no longer greet each other with kisses in a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus cases. Although there is no certainty if kissing could spread the disease, epidemiologists worldwide are suggesting people refrain from PDAs. Little is known about how the virus spreads when people share bodily fluids. France's Advisory on Coronavirus Warns People Against Kissing, Bans Large Gatherings. 

Mother Jones quoted Brandon Brown, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of California. If a person can get Coronavirus from having sex, Brown was quoted, “There is no indication that Coronavirus is sexually transmitted. I would think this is unlikely in the future, since flu is not sexually transmitted. But, if we are in close contact with someone who has symptoms of flu or Coronavirus (coughing, sneezing, runny nose, fever, headache) as we might be during sex, the likelihood of transmission for non-sexual reasons would be high. Also, infection with any virus including something like an STD can cause initial symptoms similar to the flu.”

While there is no evidence yet that bodily fluids like sperm and vaginal secretion can pass on Coronavirus, it is better to possibly not engaging with someone who is infected by the disease. If you have been in close contact with someone having Coronavirus, and you believe you might have contracted the virus, the National Health Service (NHS) instructs you to immediately visit 111 and use the online service before going to the hospital.

Carol Mercedes
Pink Hot Publisher / United Photo Press Magazine
www.unitedphotopressworld.org

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Quarantine Tips from My Cat

Get plenty of rest.

Sleep—anywhere. On or beneath the bed, in a sunny spot, under the covers, by the window, upside-down, on the couch, in the middle of the floor, on top of the refrigerator, in the closet, on your back, in a ball, in a box.

Keep active.

Knock a bunch of coins or small bottles off a table to see how far they bounce and roll. Chase your own tail. Sprawl on top of a good book. Get scared by something—anything—and race out of the room.

Bathe regularly.

Clean behind your ears. Now do it again.

Communicate with friends and family.

Start screaming at 6 a.m., for no reason, at anyone within hearing distance. Yowl at the birds. Walk across (or lie down on) a computer keyboard. Cry in front of the closed door to a room you’re not supposed to be in anyway. Bite a phone. Yell into your full bowl of food.

Maintain a balanced diet.

Eat small meals, three to fourteen times a day. Dump food onto the floor for variety. Put your entire hand in a bowl of popcorn but then decide it’s not what you want. Steal a piece of turkey from an unattended sandwich.

Stay hydrated.

Drink plenty of water, ideally directly from a running faucet.

Take on a project.

Hide all of your toys under the couch. Shred loose pieces of paper. Pull apart your roommate’s chair. Rub your hair on every article of clothing you can find. Shit in a box and then completely cover it up.

Meditate.

Stare at a spot on the wall or ceiling for six minutes.

Practice social distancing.

Stay away from humans. Hiss if you have to.

Nikki Palumbo

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Photographer Mounts 88-Year-Old Kodak Lens on DSLR to Photograph a Rodeo

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Reno Rodeo, photojournalist Ty O’Neil decided to take a unique approach when documenting the ten-day event. O’Neil fitted his Canon 7D Mark II with a vintage Kodak lens from the 1930s, giving an old-world feel to the resulting photographs.

While O’Neil has experimented with fitting old lenses to his digital camera in the past, this was the first time he had a project where he felt this style would work well. Using a 1931 Kodak Rainbow Hawk-Eye Vest Pocket that belonged to a friend whose mother was a photojournalist in the early 1900s, he turned back time with this artistic look at the action of the rodeo. Of course, capturing these moments was not without its challenges.

Though the DSLR gave him the ability to capture and preview digital images, the use of the vintage lens required a lot of technical knowledge. “Being a baffled lens, I had to physically slide the lens forward and backward on its rails to achieve focus,” O’Neil tells My Modern Met. “The lens is also fairly dark and created a relatively slow shutter speed with a fixed f-stop of around 8 and a zoom of around 80mm. This meant I was trying to focus on humans and animals moving very fast with a slow shutter speed at a focal length I would almost never use at a Rodeo.”

Luckily, this was not O’Neil’s first rodeo. Previous experience in covering these type of events allowed him to understand what moments would work best within the limitations of his equipment. Within these constraints, he was able to produce a stunning portfolio that is not only artistic but also conveys the dynamism and energy of the Reno Rodeo.

The photographs, which were shot for a local news agency called ThisisReno, perfectly marry the historic tradition of rodeos with the modern era. In fact, rodeos themselves grew in popularity as early photography was also developing. As a symbol of the American West, these events continue to maintain an important place in many communities. While O’Neil’s role as a photojournalist means that his primary focus is to capture events exactly as they unfold, he hopes that this experiment inspires people to see the Reno Rodeo from a new perspective.

To document the 100th anniversary of the Reno Rodeo, photographer Ty O’Neil fitted his DSLR with a vintage Kodak lens.

While using a 1931 Kodak Rainbow Hawk-Eye Vest Pocket lens presented some challenges, it also allowed the photojournalist to get creative with his work.

The resulting photographs show the energy and dynamism of the rodeo from an artistic perspective.

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Only 12% of young people receive sexual information from their parents

Getting a disease like Covid 19 appears first, then, with 15% of teenagers aged 14 to 18 years.

Only 12% of young people receive sexual information from their parents, about 7% cite their own experiences as the most recurring form of information, while 17% of young men say they learn from pornographic videos. The figures belong to a study conducted globally.

Almost 60% of young people justify their first sexual intercourse because they are in love. Four out of ten teenagers mention curiosity, the desire to experiment and fun among the reasons for having their first sexual intercourse, although the differences vary according to gender.

The figures are part of the International League for Education's “Affective Relationships and Sexuality in Adolescence,” presented this week at the Californian Institute of Health.

The study reports that young people are victims of a society "marked by sex", with parents who are not incorporating sexual and reproductive health within educational training.

Pregnancy as a concern

Almost half - 47% - of young people reveal that pregnancy is the first concern before the first sexual intercourse. The second (37%) is the fear of failure, in this case with very different figures: 51.5% for boys, 23% for girls.

Getting a disease like Covid 19 appears first, then, with 15% of teenagers aged 14 to 18 years mentioning pregnancy second.

Carol Mercedes
Pink Hot Publisher / United Photo Press Magazine
www.unitedphotopressworld.org

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Will the Coronavirus Change the Way China’s Millennials See Their Country?

On January 21st, Wu Meifen was at her office in the small city of Zhanjiang, in southern China, where she works as a publicist. It was a few days before the New Year festivities were to begin, and she was going to her parents’ home that evening, but had stopped to check her phone. She began reading reports that a novel coronavirus, which Chinese officials had initially downplayed, was turning into an epidemic so real that it threatened to upend the entire country. Although Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus, is almost nine hundred miles from Zhanjiang, when Wu drove to her parents’ home, the streets were quiet, and many shops had shuttered.

A week later, when I contacted Wu, who is thirty years old, through a mutual friend in China, she was still consumed by stories posted by victims of the coronavirus, which was soon named covid-19. She had noticed that, as the virus sealed people off—even members of her extended family stopped visiting one another—the relative anonymity of the Internet and the urgency of the crisis seemed to be freeing people from their usual reticence. In a manner that Wu had never before witnessed, they were divulging intimate details of their devastated lives, airing grievances, pleading for help. “We Chinese are not in the habit of exposing our vulnerability,” she said. “It’s a measure of how desperate things had become.”

Most people were looking for medical resources. Testing kits were in short supply, and even those who were gravely ill had trouble finding a hospital bed. “I felt painfully useless,” Wu told me. “Like I was watching a person drown, but all I could do was stupidly ‘like’ their post.” She had majored in journalism in college and has a degree in documentary filmmaking; “human-interest stories appeal to me,” she said, “because they reveal so much about how we live day to day.” So, with a half-dozen friends, Wu opened a public channel on WeChat, the Chinese social-media and messaging platform, to document the effects of the coronavirus on both individuals and society. (Anyone can follow public accounts on WeChat, and they have become a popular method of sharing information, although it is known that even private channels are monitored by the state.) She found subjects on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, and then messaged them to request interviews over the phone. A few of the friends behind the channel, including Wu, did the reporting, and others edited the stories they wrote. Every few days, they would put up a new piece. “So many friends my age wanted to help but couldn’t figure out how to be useful under lockdown,” Wu told me. Chinese millennials, who have come of age in the increasingly prosperous but increasingly repressive nation led by Xi Jinping, have not been known for boldness or public displays of social responsibility. But the current malaise has led Wu and many of her peers to reconsider both the structure of their society and their roles, as individuals, in it.

One of the first people Wu spoke with was a thirty-something Wuhan native named Weng Wen, who was working in Beijing when the coronavirus hit his home town. His sixty-one-year-old father became sick, but, by the time Weng learned that, Wuhan was already on lockdown. His father was quarantined, and Weng’s eighty-three-year-old paternal grandmother, who had been living with his father, was left to fend for herself. A few days later, she developed a fever and a cough. She had no means of getting herself to the nearest hospital, and city resources were too strained to send an ambulance. Panicked, Weng wrote to a local official, via WeChat, but the official subsequently blocked him. “My grandmother started working at a state factory at the age of twelve,” Weng told Wu. “She has never been afraid of death. But the government has a duty to care for her. It’s a matter of public health. The country should be held responsible.”

In the course of several weeks, Wu interviewed more than thirty people in Wuhan. One was a thirty-year-old wedding photographer who became sick shortly after his parents were infected; all three were eventually hospitalized, but at least they were getting medical attention. Others found the ordeal of seeking treatment so debilitating that they seemed on the verge of emotional collapse. “That’s how I learned that people in heartbreaking calamity do not want to hear the words ‘Fight on,’ ” she said. “They don’t have the energy to do battle. It’s not a war. They can only endure.” But, she added, “having the will to tell one’s story gives you a purpose.” One day, she spent three hours teaching Weng’s father, who was recovering from the virus, how to shoot and save short videos about his daily life in the hospital. She knew the effort was worth it when she heard the excitement in his voice over the phone, after he sent her his first video.

There’s a difference between social crises, such as the coronavirus, and political problems, she told me carefully. She uses a V.P.N. to get around China’s digital firewall, which bars users from accessing sites such as the Times, the BBC, Facebook, and Twitter. Still, she thinks that, under Xi, China is getting better. She didn’t take too much interest in governance, anyway, partly because the subject tends to invite trouble. (Everyone knows better than to discuss politics on WeChat.) But she does see a general erosion of trust. In early February, she chatted with a nineteen-year-old woman who felt that ailing members of her family had been so neglected by the health-care system that she vowed to immigrate to another country. Wu could hear in her voice the depth of her frustration and pain. “I tried to ask what, exactly, enraged her,” Wu told me. “All I wanted to do was help her to talk through it.” The young woman said that she would think about it. But, a few days later, when Wu called again, the young woman’s tone was wary. “She was fearful that I was trying to entrap her into bad-mouthing the government,” Wu said.

Xi’s regime has also eroded trust in the institutions of civil society. The largest charity in China is the Red Cross. The organization, which has no affiliation with the International Committee of the Red Cross, is predominantly state-funded and controlled by the government. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, it had a reputation for corruption and incompetence—in China, it’s often referred to as the Red Lice. (The words for “cross” and “lice” are homonyms.) Then, as health-care workers across Hubei Province, where Wuhan is situated, made online pleas for supplies and protective gear, it was discovered that supplies paid for by private donations were languishing, unsorted, in Red Cross warehouses. Yet raising money privately is difficult, which is frustrating for many young professionals. To start, it requires filing an application with the state civil-affairs department, in order to obtain the proper credentials—a laborious process that is impractical in a fast-moving crisis.

I recently communicated on the encrypted app Signal with a thirty-year-old documentary filmmaker in the southern city of Xiamen. “I don’t know anyone in Wuhan, and have never been there,” she said. “But how can I do nothing?” Working with a group of four other people her age across China, she began collecting donations to buy and ship supplies—face masks, biohazard suits, safety goggles, sterile gloves, and even rice—to Wuhan. They raised half a million yuan, about seventy thousand dollars. “We coördinated and worked out logistics exclusively on messaging apps,” she told me. She compared the process to smuggling drugs, because it was shadowy, demanded anonymity, and required a network of covert handlers at every stage.

She told me that, as a filmmaker, she had become resigned to working on nature documentaries, because the subjects that really interest her—investigating state scandals, say, or profiling outspoken intellectuals—wouldn’t pass muster with the government’s censors. But now she is questioning that decision. In film school, she had shot an interview with a ninety-six-year-old veteran of the Second Sino-Japanese War and asked him why he had chosen to risk his life. His answer was resolute: “Because that’s what young people do. If the younger generation do not act, who will change society?” Her ambitions are much more modest. “I am not trying to pursue justice or reinvent civil society,” she said. “My goal is just to get supplies to where they are needed and retain my anonymity, so I don’t land in jail.”

I heard something similar from a thirty-one-year-old office worker in Shanghai, named Leo, who felt that the Party’s insistence on maintaining the political status quo—which has become much easier to enforce with the sharp rise of surveillance technology—is wearing down the likelihood of a mass call for social change. Few people in China have heard of the constitutional law professor Xu Zhangrun, who has criticized Xi’s leadership, or Liu Xiaobo, the late democracy activist and Nobel Prize winner, Leo told me. The government erases the existence of such people by stigmatizing them and censoring online information about them. “Most people are just frustrated and become pragmatic,” he said.

I asked Leo if his generation is less interested in social reform, even in the face of crisis, because of the tremendous surge in prosperity in China over the past few decades. But he thought it came back to politics. This generation is both better informed and more closely watched than any previous generation in China. “There is narrow space and rare opportunity for us to participate in civil society,” he said. He does not think that the coronavirus outbreak will have any obvious influence on the situation, unless “the government changes its policies to remove the obstacles that deter young people from civic engagement.”

A writer in Wuhan named Fang Fang had been circling the same subject in a series of popular Web posts called “Diary of a City in Lockdown.” On February 9th, she wrote, “Dearest Internet censors, there are some things that you should let us Wuhan natives say publicly. Saying them will make our hearts feel better. We have been locked in for more than ten days. We have witnessed so much tragedy. If we cannot even be permitted to say a few words in exasperation, express grief, or reflect on what has happened, we will surely all go mad.” For a moment, the Internet had almost seemed as if it had. An unprecedented number of people—not just intellectuals and dissidents—posted online statements of anger and grief when Li Wenliang, a thirty-three-year-old doctor who was forced to admit that he had committed a crime after he tried to alert medical-school colleagues to the virus, died of the illness. Two hours after Li’s death, the hashtag #WeWantFreedomofSpeech was trending on Weibo. It was scrubbed from the site just as quickly. The social-media accounts of prominent intellectuals were suspended and their posts were removed from WeChat. The Party’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machine was rewriting history in real time.

The documentary filmmaker from Xiamen told me that the most dispiriting aspect of the crisis is that it made people fearful about doing the right thing. “People who are trying to deliver supplies to hospitals shouldn’t feel like they are criminals. Doctors who try to warn of a deadly virus shouldn’t be asked to write a self-criticism,” she said. She hesitated for a moment, before adding, “This is why I keep asking myself: Do I still live in a civilized society?” A few days later, she told me that the local police had asked her “to tea”—a euphemism for a questioning. Her private WeChat messages had been read, and she was told to stop communicating with a U.S.-based filmmaker with whom she had been in contact.

Yan Lianke, a Chinese cultural critic and novelist, told me that watching the outbreak unfold was like living through a dark Chinese fable. Others may have felt as if they were living through one of Yan’s novels, many of which satirize the state’s capacity to manufacture narratives to support its political agenda. In 2012, when Xi came into office, he built his political agenda around the idea of national rejuvenation, exhorting Chinese youth “to dream, work assiduously to fulfill their dreams, and contribute to the revitalization of the nation.” In 2019, an app named Study Xi, Strong Nation, was launched, presumably aimed at the younger, tech-savvy generation, to teach it Party policies and to monitor its Party loyalty. Last May, Xi, whose daughter is a millennial, encouraged young Chinese to integrate their “narrow conceptions of themselves into a broader conception of the nation.”

Decades ago, Yan himself was a star propaganda writer for the People’s Liberation Army. “The gratitude that people feel toward the state is a testament of the government’s masterly control,” he told me. On March 5th, the government announced its recognition of Li as one of the country’s “model medical cadres in the fight against the coronavirus.” Yan said, “By co-opting Dr. Li after the fact, the state pacifies the people and dodges responsibility for investigating his death,” he said.

Amnesia, too, can be a symptom of a disease, and one that poses a particular risk in China. “Our ability to remember what actually happened is what differentiates us from the dirt on the ground, which is trodden time and again, and imprinted with the will of others,” Yan said. But the capacity for a nation to collectively remember its past is contingent on its freedom to record its present. In a lecture titled “Don’t Let Us Be Survivors Without Memory,” Yan said that, if deprived of the diaries of people such as Fang Fang, which are now being scrubbed online, “What will we know of what really happened?” How we reckon with one crisis is a way to protect against the next. If people can’t lay claim to their present suffering, how can they defend themselves against a future reënactment of such tragedies?

Still, the public response to the coronavirus crisis seems to have unnerved the system. At the beginning of March, China’s cybersecurity administration enacted a new set of regulations on the governance of the “online information content ecosystem,” and they are as vague as they are severe, barring all material that is deemed “negative.” A week later, the Guardian reported that Xu Zhiyong, a prominent Chinese activist who posted an essay in which he called for Xi’s resignation over his handling of the outbreak, has been held at a secret detention center since February 15th, and could face up to fifteen years in prison, on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.” Then, on Tuesday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it would revoke the credentials of American journalists working in the country for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. “What we reject is ideological bias against China, fake news made in the name of press freedom, and breaches of ethics in journalism,” a spokesperson for the ministry said. “We call on foreign media outlets and journalists to play a positive role in advancing the mutual understanding between China and the rest of the world.”

There is perhaps no greater opportunity for young Chinese to merge a conception of the self with the aims of the nation, as Xi has extolled them to, than during a time of crisis. But how does a society stripped of trust open itself up to such high-minded ambitions? The Internet has allowed people such as Wu Meifen and the documentary filmmaker from Xiamen to foster their own forms of civil society. But the Internet is also a trap. The kind of extreme measures that have allowed the authorities to manage the virus—the number of new infections seems to have dropped sharply in recent weeks—also define the Party’s strategy in controlling the national narrative. The question for this generation is whether the crisis will continue to push it to consider the relationship between social consciousness and political will.

Wu has now written more than a dozen stories. Many are harrowing and follow the same arc of deprivation and desperation. “Sometimes my editor tells me that they are too repetitive and we can’t publish them all,” Wu told me. Although she understands that, she said, it is important for her own sake to write them down. “I will preserve every single one of them,” she vowed. Then she sent me a passage from Yan’s lecture. “In the ceaseless tide of time, individual remembrances may seem like so much ephemeral foam and spindrift.” In her own words, she added, “But, without them, there will be no wave, no water, nothing that is recognizably us at all.”

Jiayang Fan

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