How Chubbyemu(YouTuber) helped get the word out about Coronavirus
Chubbyemu is a medical doctor and YouTube creator. In January he began collaborating with a group of medical doctors in China to make a video describing how Coronavirus impacts a human’s body. His video has been viewed nearly 2 million times, making it one of the early warnings that Americans heard about the Pandemic. See the full interview here.
VC: For people that don’t know, Bernard’s videos are like Dr. house on cocaine or something. Instead of having all the drama around where there’s like romances and things like that Bernard’s videos are like a woman did this and this is what happened to her brain or to her liver to her whatever and then he goes through and describes the medical case for what happens. It’s like rollercoaster of emotions for what’s happening because oftentimes he describes it in a way where you’re like — I probably wouldn’t do that but that would be bad if it happened to me and he ended up not only building a United States audience but also a Chinese audience and way before the curve, he put out a video on coronavirus and about what it does to your lungs. It was one of those things that really woke me awake.
BH: I’m lucky because back in 2017, there was a resident I think in Guangzhou province or Guangzhou China and he was translating my videos and posting it to Chinese social media with subtitles so it would be English words with Chinese on top and so the people who wanted to listen, they could learn some English from it by both listening to what I’m saying and also reading and correlating with the Chinese characters and so he had asked my permission to repost it at the time and I thought no — I don’t know what happens on Chinese social media because they don’t have Facebook, they don’t have Google, they don’t have Twitter, and so then I looked a little bit further and I’m figured well, this guy was really asking for forgiveness because he had already done all the translating. I saw that and I told him sure you can but you do have to make a chubbyemu channel, you can’t put it under your name David Lai, because I’m not David Lai and so he agreed and what ended up happening -and that was in 2018 — is that this team exploded into like a group of I think like at least 15 or 20 people and so what ended up turning out is
VC: You created a place where people could congregate, that’s a gravity well.
BH: Yeah it was interesting. I think he’s now a full attending physician but he didn’t see huge amounts of coronavirus because he’s in the South part of China and so when the coronavirus hit I remember I had went back to Illinois for the Chinese New Year and we added all these announcement of coronavirus and you know people were still joking about it at the time. They’re still joking about it but it’s a little bit different now than it was back then and so he had told me Wuhan is probably going to get locked down and I think they had the suspicions of it because it seemed like it was pretty severe and so I said do we have anybody on the team from who’s from Wuhan and they had a couple people from the province that Wuhan is in. Then what happened was they were like yeah we know a bunch of the pathologists and radiologists and critical care doctors that are in the hospital and so I thought okay, can we get in touch? We were able to get on with them and talk about what was going on as it was starting to get crazy and they were able to pull some of the cases from the database to say these are some pretty severe cases and that as long as we’re not giving out the patient information, it’s fine, but this is the message that we want to get out.
For me at the time it was hard to get it out right in January, so I ended up releasing it near the end of February and that was as the news was starting to get big here in America. I mean it didn’t really get huge until probably late March, so we had a whole month.
VC: Around when did you start working on this video with those guys?
BH: So that started January 23rd. It was probably like a month before I was posted.
VC: And what happened when you posted that video, how did people respond to it?
BH: It was good at first, things kind of wax and wane on YouTube and so for probably the last year it’s a lot different now than it was two years ago which is to be expected when you think of this kind of medium so at that point, a lot of people were wondering why is this a serious thing? What is this virus doing to our people? Should we really be taking it seriously like it’s just the flu? The answer is no, it’s not just the flu but you should be alert, but you shouldn’t be freaking out about it. You should be alert and you know if you don’t need to go somewhere and you don’t need to get up close to somebody, you probably shouldn’t and that held true back then and it definitely holds true now.
Let’s keep the conversation going,
Vance
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