 Li Wenlang died at 258 on February 7th, 2020. We deeply regret and mourn this. When Wuhan's central hospital announced the death of the 34 year old ophthalmologist on the social media site Weibo, there was an outpouring of sadness and anger in China. It was one of the first signs that something far more troubling was happening in the city of Wuhan than the Chinese government was letting on. When Wenlang had tried to alert his colleagues via WeChat that he was witnessing an alarming spike in respiratory illnesses, the local government forced him and eight other people to sign apologetic admissions of rumormongering. And that was the beginning of a disinformation campaign by government leaders around the world that would help turn a crisis into a global pandemic. Chinese officials later assured the public they'd found no human to human transmissions of the viral pneumonia he'd posted about and that the disease was preventable and controllable. In January, government officials shut down the food market where they suspected the disease had originated. Nine days later, a 61 year old man who regularly shopped at the market became the first known fatality. But what government officials failed to tell the public was that his wife, who had never visited the market, also caught the virus meaning that it was transmittable among humans. As the hospital ward filled and workers began to fall ill, China's politicians still refused to acknowledge for weeks that human to human transmission was happening, even staging a 40,000 family potluck in Wuhan and instructing hospitals not to use the words viral pneumonia on lung scan reports. As the death toll in China climbed, the national government pointed fingers at local authorities and Wuhan's mayor said his hands were tied by a national law requiring approval from central authorities before declaring an epidemic. In late January, Lee texted a New York Times reporter from his hospital bed that, if the officials had disclosed the information about the epidemic earlier, I think it would have been a lot better. There should have been more openness and transparency. Concern for the need to better guide public opinion on the issue turned out to be President Xi's rationale for refusing to disclose human to human transmission for several weeks. In February, authorities jailed an activist who dared criticize Xi's handling of the crisis. A journalist reporting stories inside Wuhan critical of the government's response disappeared, as did a wealthy tycoon who publicly blamed the Communist Party's speech restrictions for worsening the spread. As the first U.S. patients began testing positive, the Trump administration downplayed the threat. It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle it will disappear. There's no reason to panic because we have done so good. Is it real? It absolutely is real. There is no question about it. But you saw the president the other day. The flu is real. 14 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. They think this is going to be what brings down the president. That's what this is all about. This is their new hope. The lag in testing was in fact a failing. Do you take responsibility for that? No, I don't take responsibility at all. But there's also an enormous difference between a country that jails dissenting voices and the U.S. with its strong First Amendment protections. The media and political class have derided Twitter and Facebook for lacking adequate gatekeepers. But it was through these platforms that medical professionals, technologists, epidemiologists and everyday citizens bypassed the media and the government to implore their fellow citizens to act. A Twitter thread from a member of a Seattle-based medical team that defied the CDC to run tests and discovered an outbreak in the city and sequenced the genome got the word out about the value of social distancing long before the federal government did. Yale social scientist and physician Nicholas Krstakis explained the science of disease spread to further promote social distancing and self-isolation in threads shared thousands of times. On January 30th, technologist and venture capitalist Balje Srinivasan asked on Twitter, What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years? And then began encouraging the cancellation of events, pleading for more early testing and warning about the lack of reliable information coming out of China. He was critical of early media coverage that often downplayed the threat of the outbreak with facile comparisons to the flu and flippant dismissals of companies in Silicon Valley that began taking precautions early. And of course, this non-issue turned out to be very much an issue, and they weren't simply getting the story wrong, but they were actively attempting to shame and silence people getting the story right. And some of them, you know, later insincerely apologized. Others wrote, you know, columns about how they got the story wrong and this slightly went sincerely. And then once Trump started adopting their early talking points about how the virus was just the flu, several of them have reversed themselves and pretended, you know, they've been taking it seriously all along. As the government continues to stumble, the decentralized response has been forthcoming with individuals voluntarily self-isolating after the flatten the curve chart was circulated widely on social media. Doctors in Seattle defied the federal government to test for COVID-19. States like Colorado implemented their own drive through testing stations and mayors and governors began taking extreme measures to protect the spread within dense city centers. But to keep the decentralized response going, information channels will need to remain as open as possible. To this day, the centers in China are being muzzled or worse, and the Trump administration has classified several top-level coronavirus meetings. American social media is chaotic, confusing, and full of bad actors and misinformation. Wild speculation abounds, but that wild, free-wheeling conversation keeps us safer than a censored press or even a free press controlled by professionals. The contagious spread of information in a race against the contagious spread of the disease remains a powerful weapon when confronting this global emergency.