“Hope Curve”

On the fourth day of home isolation, my daily life finally settled down in the new base area. The school required all students to report their health through the dormitory WeChat group at 7 o'clock every evening. If a student failed to report in time, the dormitory staff would immediately go to his room to check his condition. For those who lived outside the university, failing to report within the prescribed time is tantamount to delaying the signing of their scholarships. If he failed to report for a seond consecutive day, he would be deprived of the scholarship for that month. As not yet mentioned, I have a special doctoral scholarship every year, and signing the monthly attendance record book is a regular procedure for receiving their scholarship.

What did we report every day? The main content of the report was body temperature. The school informed us not to go to the hospital on our own before contacting the Foreign Students Office. On the first night of the lockdown, two Pakistani and Iraqi classmates went to the hospital after having a fever. At that time, Wuhan Hospital was crowded with people, and so highly prone to cross infection. In particular, people were in great shock and fear that night, and the hospital was unable to accept such a large number of patients. I wanted to speak out to remind them,please don't forget: We are in China.

Two classmates described their situation in a WeChat group. The Iraqi classmate said that he found his body temperature was 37.5 degrees and went to hospital. When he arrived at the hospital, he waited for four hours in the same room with a large group of people, some of whom had obvious symptoms of infection, such as a dry cough. When the nurse let him enter to wait, he asked to leave immediately because his body temperature was only 37 degrees. After completing the procedures of identity verification,swab collection, and sampling, he returned to the university. The situation described by a Pakistani classmate was broadly similar.

From that night on, we agreed that we would avoid going to the hospital unless there were obvious symptoms throughout the day.Subsequently, the local government carried out the same suggestion in its publicity. Soon thereafter, after the local government medical team assessed the condition of suspected patients, with tightened reception procedures the local government dispatched a special medical team to send suspected patients to a special hospital for isolation and observation.

In my new daily work, I began to collect data on the number of infections, deaths and cured cases in Wuhan, in China, and in the world.At that time, most of the infected cases in the world were concentrated in Wuhan. As of 0:00 on the day when Wuhan was closed down, a total of 571 confirmed cases and 17 deaths was reported in China. Confirmed cases also appeared in other parts of the world, including one in the United States.

I stared at the phone intently, sometimes with only one eye open until I fell asleep. The Chinese search engine “Baidu” had been running on my mobile phone. The program provided data released by the National Health Commission of China every day. I saved the information when I saw it.Then, I filled out the school's daily health report form.

When I got up every day, the first thing I did was to enter this information into the computer. I monitored the dynamic process of data in the self-built table. This was not a simple link, but by analyzing the path of infection and the impact it has produced, we could calculate whether we were heading for victory or the opposite direction. I followed up and updated these figures and tables every day, with the purpose of drawing a curve by myself.

I had learned that the effective solution to control the epidemic was to isolate ourselves at home. Quarantine will cut the chain of virus transmission. According to this epidemiological survey, the incubation period of the new coronavirus was 14 days. The curve clearly reflected the development trend.

The new coronavirus required contact with people to spread. If home isolation was achieved, the number of confirmed cases each day should gradually decrease, and the curve reflecting the number of confirmed cases would show a downward trend. Of course, this situation was only theoretically possible. Any violation of quarantine would affect the possibility of curve decline. By then, there would be a disastrous continuous upward curve on the chart.

This was a scientific method that could verify the authenticity of the data released by Chinese official agencies. Therefore, as a result of the isolation, only when this data were consistent with the expected path,would be sufficient to show that the data was correct.

Of course, there was no need to talk about mortality and cure rates,because other factors determined them. The professional capabilities of medical staff, hospital admissions, treatment methods in the rehabilitation process and the provision of effective drugs all had exerted an important influence on the healing process.

This was clearly self-explanatory to me, because this was my research field: inferring phenomena based on data. At the same time, I also evaluated the effectiveness of government measures by analyzing these figures. Therefore, this was one of the most effective research methods to analyze the existing situation and deduce the next development. These conclusions were inferred through these data charts.

I had converted each number into part of the curve. I checked it every day, all I cared about was the shape of the graph, no matter what kind of curve it was. The effect of the lockdown was expected to manifest itself by mid-February. I had been able to roughly determine the date of infection of cases. For example, if we were talking about cases reported on January 20, then these cases were expected to be infected on January 6 before the 14-day incubation period. Up until then, I had been hanging this graph in the room and calling it the “Hope Curve”.