The police came for Dr. Li Wenliang in the middle of the night on the first day of the year. Just days earlier, Li, a physician in Wuhan, China, had sent a message to his medical school alumni group on WeChat informing them that a cluster of patients with a strange new virus had been quarantined in the hospital where he worked.
Unbeknownst to Li, he had just issued the first public warning about the novel strain of coronavirus that has sickened more than 125,000 people globally and killed more than 4,600.