A year after the first known cases of coronavirus, covid prevention measures are almost a reminder in Wuhan, though residents don’t forget or wonder how a pandemic started to spread that continues to control the entire planet.
No cases of local contamination since mid-May, with public transport in the provincial capital Hubei, located in the center of the Asian country, Rapid recognition (QR) health codes that ensure that a person is not infected are no longer necessary, and the use of masks decreases since the massive confinement the city underwent last January.
THE WUHANS BELIEVE THAT RESTRICTION WAS NEEDED
On the contrary, residents are preparing to usher in 2021, which will be characterized by complete confinement of the city for 11 weeks, which, according to residents, was the only possible measure to prevent the covid from spreading even further and this would keep doing. havoc.
“In the beginning, when we read the first news, we didn’t take it seriously. But when it became known that (the coronavirus) was being transmitted between humans, we started to understand what was happening and how terrible it could be,” he tells Efe. a neighbor, Hong, who has recently retired, who now spends his days flying kites on the banks of the Yangtze River.
His gesture twists as he recalls the most difficult moments, which he has not yet forgotten. The worst, he assures, happened when family members, friends or colleagues started to get infected, without really knowing what was going on: “Ultimately, a person or a family is not important. one to the other without distinction, and hence the measures they took to control it. “
After being sealed for 11 weeks, the near absence of new cases prompted authorities to lift restrictions in April.
Aside from the incarceration, Wuhan managed to turn things around thanks to the arrival of equipment and personnel from other Chinese provinces, vigorous preventive measures or the express construction of hospitals such as Leishenshan, which began admitting patients in February.
THE ORIGIN OF THE VIRUS, TABOO THEME
A young woman who prefers not to mention her name adds that many people in the city feel guilty that Wuhan recorded the first cases of the then “mysterious pneumonia outbreak”, although she insists that “hardly anyone wants it. to talk”.
“In those days, just released in 2020, many residents avoided the topic, and many protected each other to avoid knowing who was infected,” he says.
He believes it will be “very, very difficult” to know what happened or how the pandemic started, but he celebrates that despite some sporadic outbreaks, China has managed to keep it practically under control without deaths have also been recorded since May.
He also recalls the confusion that prevailed in the early stages of the outbreak, and that it was not until February that the city government realized that it had taken too long to make the available information public, as they believed they needed the approval of higher authorities to make it public. .
It also ignores the case of citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who was sentenced today by a court in Shanghai to four years in prison for “provoking dissent and seeking trouble” over the arrests of other independent reporters and harassing the families of the US. victims. of the coronavirus during the outbreak.
According to the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) organization, the woman was detained several months ago for publishing that Wuhan civilians had been given tainted food while detained or forced to pay fees to be tested for nucleic acid.
Meanwhile, the official press has brought up the story that the initial outbreak of the pandemic could have been related to frozen food imports or originated in other countries earlier, as authorities reiterated their willingness to work with the World Organization for Health (WHO) for a group of experts to travel to the Asian country in January to investigate the origin of the virus.
It is not known whether this trip will have a stop at the Huanan Fish Market, which has been tightly closed since January 1 of this year, and which the WHO is debating whether ‘it was the source of the contamination, whether it acted as an amplifier for human-to-human contamination or if it was a combination of those factors. “