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 year's most notable passings, the inspired and inspiring figures

who died this year.

I think 2020 has been a great surprise.

Anne Roe 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 have been so many hundreds of thousands of deaths.

On the other hand, deaths of prominent people have not been, I'd say, any more 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 Wyniang, 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 Weibo account.

He said he'd noticed a cluster of strange cases of pneumonia

in patients who all seemed to work at the Wuhan food market.

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

The SARS epidemic in China in 20 or two to three had killed 700 people.

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

It wasn't in fact.

And an hour later he corrected his post and said it hadn't been identified.

But the damage was done, the post went viral. his post and said it hadn't been identified.

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