As the novel coronavirus outbreak continues to unfold here in China, I have been glued to my cellphone for updates every waking hour. Many valuable posts and video clips get deleted only a few hours after being released online, so people have to make screen shots in order to retweet them and avoid intensifying censorship. Both Chinese social media posts and established press reports give every reason to believe that the real number of confirmed cases is far bigger than the official release no

I’m a Harvard Business Review China journalist based in Beijing, and I grew up in this city. In 2003, I survived the outbreak of SARS while preparing for my college-entrance examination. Many people’s lives were permanently changed because of SARS, including my own. I certainly didn’t expect that, 17 years later, I would witness another outbreak of coronavirus more serious than SARS again in my hometown. What follows is my own account, from a mainland Chinese perspective, of how the vir