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refusal to take the possible spread of coronavirus seriously. At a minimum, Yang thought, the scan would show his colleagues just how quickly the disease could move. Yang made a quick video that showed the deterioration from one scan to the next and posted it on Twitter, asking people to help get in touch with Gilead, to help this patient with “sudden, rapidly progressing resp failure.”
Within 12 hours, half a million people had watched the video. C. Michael Gibson, the founder of the open-source textbook WikiDoc and a top cardiologist with nearly a half a million followers, helped by quickly retweeting Yang. Hundreds of doctors from around the world shared whatever they knew in comments; one doctor, an American who had been traveling back and forth to China, paged Yang at his hospital to share with him what she had learned. Yang believes hundreds of individuals tweeted at Gilead to try to get the company’s attention on Cai’s behalf.
Balani had already been laying the groundwork with Gilead to apply for remdesivir from the time Cai tested positive. His condition now made him eligible for compassionate use. Less than four hours after the image was first tweeted out, Gilead informed Cai’s doctors that the company was shipping the medicine out. Bill Pulte, a philanthropist active on Twitter, also posted a video of Cai that night that circulated widely; other media soon followed. (Gilead declined to provide details, saying it could not comment on individual compassionate-use cases.)
Around 3 a.m. on March 10, Balani arrived at the hospital. The medicine had come in, and she did not want to wait
until the morning to administer it. With Balani in the room, a nurse woke Cai up so that he could sign the legal papers. Soon after, he was hooked up, intravenously, to the drug.
The next day Cai’s fever, which he’d had for at least nine days, finally broke. Even before he received the remdesivir, his oxygen levels started to stabilize. Now they indicated he was on the mend. He was still so weak in the following days that he could barely speak without exhaustion; every time he tried, he was racked by coughs. But the progress was steady, and about a week later, he was able to speak to his wife more easily, to start to feel confident walking around his room; he began to let himself picture himself back at home. His daughter would come running, he imagined, with his slippers when he walked through the door, as she always did. Now that he was recovering, his wife admitted to him that his daughter had been running to the door with his slippers for the last couple of weeks every time she heard a noise beyond it, then cried in disappointment when her father failed to arrive.
"He was still so weak in the following days that he could barely speak without exhaustion; every time he tried; he was racked by coughs."