AusDoc is looking back at the year. One of the best-read stories was this article about Dr Lin Qingchuan who lived through the first months of the outbreak that would turn the world upside down.

It’s a story of bewildered panic in a city under the control of a paranoid government, obsessed with engineering perceptions as much as dealing with the realities of the virus and its lethal spread.

Dr Qingchuan, as you will quickly understand from reading this, is a hero.

Paid the equivalent of just $620 a month, he was a doctor prepared to question the communist system, its senseless stupidity, its bureaucratic intimidation and its promotion of traditional Chinese medicine as a cure.