This “Takedown” Of Allison Pearson’s Question About Wuhan Is Going Viral

British columnist and author Allison Pearson, who said that lockdown doesn’t save lives, started 2021 with a tweet, asking how has Wuhan managed to get the coronavirus under control.

Well, Wuhan was placed under a strict lockdown—public transport was suspended, school re-openings after the winter vacation were delayed, and population movements were severely curtailed. Dozens of cities in the entire Hubei Province implemented family outdoor restrictions, which typically meant that only one member of each household was permitted to leave the home every couple of days to collect necessary supplies. Also, China set up an effective national system of contact tracing, managing to test 9 million people for SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan within weeks and built. Not to mention drones equipped with loudspeakers patrolling the streets. The list goes on.

But those are just the facts. Sam Bowman, on the other hand, decided to answer Pearson’s question with poetry. He crafted his reply using the headlines of her own articles as statements. Since then, over 120,000 people have “liked” Sam’s response, and someone even re-uploaded it to the subreddit Murdered by Words, where it is going viral too.