Telling Wuhan’s stories
My roots are from Wuhan and much of my family lives minutes away from the Huanan Seafood Market where COVID-19 was first recorded. Wuhan is also where my mother went to medical school and practiced as a physician.
It happened to be that my academic and professional interests are at the intersection of health, environment, policy and media and I had previously shadowed for two summers in hospitals in China. Out of what may have been a combination of despair and frustration in January, I quickly got on my COVID-19 beat and joined the Duke One Health team (PI: Dr. Gregory Gray), an interdisciplinary respiratory infectious disease lab at Duke University.
With a humanitarian emergency that hit so close to home, I had to dive right in and do the one thing I could do from an ocean away: write.