COVID-19: Three years later, Wuhan wants to forget about the world’s first quarantine

Three years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Wuhan, the city in the center China in which the transmission began coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has turned the page, and its residents don’t even want to remember the lengthy confinement they’ve endured or associate the city’s name with the pathogen.

wuhan It was the first city in the world to be subject to a lockdown that lasted more than three months, at a time when little was known about the extent of the virus and had only just become known that it could be transmitted between people.

Its residents remember the chaos of the first days of January 2020 when the virus began to wreak havoc, although it was in November 2019 that many epidemiologists and virologists believe that it began to circulate through the city.

Beijing claims the first confirmed case was a man who fell ill on Dec. 1, but not until Jan. 23. wuhan — the ninth most populous city in China and one of the major commercial, industrial and educational centers in the central part of the country — has been left in isolation and paralyzed until further notice, causing suffering and fear for many of its residents.

“It was impossible to enter or leave the house, and no one had enough food, because it was impossible to predict how long we would not go out. Nothing was known about the virus, how many patients there were, or what symptoms he had. what exactly is caused, nor how many beds will be available. We also feared that the information would be hidden from us. It was very difficult at first,” Chu Jing resident of EFE recalls.

The situation was turned around by strict preventive measures, accelerated construction of hospitals, or the help of volunteers, carriers and couriers who distributed medicines, delivered food to residential complexes, or transported patients to hospitals.

“Most people have already turned the page on what happened three years ago. Nobody wants to remember this. First of all, we do not want this to be associated with wuhan with a virus. It all started here, but it could have been anywhere else,” adds Chu.

From “zero covid” to life with the virus

China moved from minimizing the impact of the disease to a strict policy of preventing it, “zero covid”which meant the closure of its borders from March 2020 until January 8 to prevent the “importation” of cases from abroad.

In addition, officials faced the difficult task of preventing outbreaks, but also not imposing “excessive restrictions” that would paralyze the economy.

“It got more and more difficult with the omicron. The strategy may make sense in 2020 or 2021 because so far virus still resulted in deaths in the rest of the world, here we could lead a relatively normal life,” says Chu.

“The problem is that the omicron is almost impossible to control, and the restrictions have become more and more draconian. They dismantled everything that this policy implied, day after day, but I would not say that it was completely unexpected. After the protests, and given the economic situation that the country is going through, it was to be expected that this would happen sooner or later,” he says.

“There was no golden mean, it was about “zero covid” or open your hand But it was amazing that it happened so suddenly,” he concludes.

And the fact is that the accumulated discontent caused protests in various parts of the country at the end of November last year, in front of which the government, almost every day, relied on softer governance. COVID-19 and opening borders.

Official propaganda and officials in the country justified the turnaround on the grounds that there were now “effective drugs for diagnosis and treatment” or that “more than 90% of the population has already been vaccinated.”

But despite a tsunami of infections and scenes of high hospital pressure in some Chinese cities After leaving politics, the authorities barely reported 60,000 deaths in medical centers from the disease.

“Were the numbers ever real?” asks a resident when asked if she trusts the official figures offered by agencies for these three years.

Wuhan, like other major Chinese cities, is returning to a new normal today, to life with the virus, although the task of the Asian giant now is to cope with the spread of covid in the countryside during the Lunar New holidays. A year that falls between January 21st and January 27th. (According to EFE and AFP)