China spent the crucial first days of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak arresting people who posted about it online and threatening journalists

Leading Chinese authorities were quick to investigate the outbreak of an H7N9 strain of bird flu that has killed six people in 11 days, including three in five weeks, the BBC reports.

A month after the first illness in more than five years, government officials realized that their initial efforts to discredit online rumors and criticize the infection were putting lives at risk.

On Monday, authorities joined forces with suspended investigative journalist Wuhan Xuwei, who went to detention after he uploaded a video that showed two young people in shelter being sickened by a lethal strain of bird flu. The video was deleted from Twitter and Facebook but authorities continued to issue a series of online warnings about live-streaming and other gatherings.

The authorities ordered local officials to take down all online “tongue nogayas (go along with rumors),” or online blogs. The state-run Xinhua news agency, Xinhua, posted a statement on its official microblog Tuesday calling for “careful moves to avoid causing problems for the health-care system.”

The crackdown hit small-time online rumors and blogging. Pro-Beijing bloggers such as Caixin and Caixin Online fought back, publishing investigative stories that led authorities to suddenly intercept, detain and interrogate hundreds of microbloggers, as well as Chinese authorities who refused to show up for questioning.

Even more damaging, online rumors – originally spread by journalists sympathetic to the grassroots public health movement – have increasingly contributed to public hysteria and made it impossible for authorities to control the spread of the disease.

“The worst days of our work occurred during the week before the first patient was diagnosed,” Caixin reported Tuesday, quoting Shi Jingping of Guangxi’s primary medicine department.

“…Though China’s urban population was susceptible to H7N9 more than in neighbouring countries, people in China and abroad communicated about it.”

“Chinese readers made a net gain of several million dollars per day for discussing the virus on Twitter,” Caixin said, “but many of them still hadn’t been interviewed by security teams, who also believed that they would be closed forever.”

At least, at first.

“China’s official media outlets slammed their counterparts in Hong Kong and Taiwan over allegations of ‘black propaganda,’ in the height of the controversy around the H7N9 epidemic,” Reuters reports. “Among those targeted were well-known Hong Kong and Taiwanese bloggers.”

And Ma Xiaoming, the editor of China’s most famous dissident newspaper, Guangzhou Daily, was arrested over the weekend and accused of spreading “black propaganda” on microblogs. But authorities are still searching for a director who ran the newspaper’s overseas edition, which ran prominently on the forefront of the campaign.

China allowed few foreigners and Chinese reporters to publish in the media during the H7N9 outbreak. Other countries, including Hong Kong, blocked access to websites showing the virus. The US temporarily implemented a system to block Chinese domestic news, some of which included people close to government, until the government and international community stepped in.

The problem of how to treat and censor unfounded rumors is a delicate issue. In July 2013, a flurry of online rumours that the US was working on a nuclear weapon with North Korea prompted the FBI to arrest a Vietnamese man accused of spreading rumors that the United States is testing a weapon capable of striking the mainland. Authorities in Dalian in northeast China arrested an employee of China’s largest ferry operator after he spread rumors about ordering divers on board two tankers of bound for North Korea to find the whereabouts of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.