Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Most weekdays we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Today though, we'll be looking back at some of the years most notable passings.

The inspired and inspiring figures who died this year.

I think 2020 has been a great surprise.

Anne Rome is our obituaries editor.

When I heard about the pandemic, I thought at first that there'd be so many candidates every week

that I wouldn't know who to choose and we'd have this awful business of not knowing who we should prioritize.

Of course, there've been so many hundreds of thousands of deaths.

On the other hand, deaths of prominent people have not been, I'd say,

not common than usual.

One face though that was not known to most people,

but was extremely important, was that of one of the first doctors to raise the alarm about COVID-19.

And this was Lee Wilyung, who worked at the Wuhan Central Hospital.

He was one of eight doctors who suddenly noticed something strange

and put it up as a post on his waybo account.

He said he'd noticed a cluster of strange cases of pneumonia in patients who all seem to work at the Wuhan food market.

And he was concerned about them because he seemed to him, they looked like SARS.

The SARS-o-bitemic in China in 20 or 2 to 3 had killed 700 people.

And so he posted that he thought that this was SARS.

It wasn't, in fact.

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