This is much smaller and much more recent, but Li Wenliang seems to have been somewhat idolized for sharing information about COVID in December 2019. At that point the local government policy on COVID was roughly similar to what policy had been on the SARS epidemic: keep it quiet and don’t let people know what is happening. Local police/government officials were not happy that he shared this information. He died from COVID in February 2020. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but it seems reasonable that X number of severe illnesses and Y number of deaths ended up not happening because he shared information about COVID.
This is much smaller and much more recent, but Li Wenliang seems to have been somewhat idolized for sharing information about COVID in December 2019. At that point the local government policy on COVID was roughly similar to what policy had been on the SARS epidemic: keep it quiet and don’t let people know what is happening. Local police/government officials were not happy that he shared this information. He died from COVID in February 2020. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but it seems reasonable that X number of severe illnesses and Y number of deaths ended up not happening because he shared information about COVID.