The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
One year on
In early 2020 Wuhan emerged as the epicentre of the Covid-19 outbreak, even as Communist Party officials attempted to keep China’s citizens in the dark about its lethal consequences. One year on, with deaths still on the rise around the world, the city is apparently back to business as usual and gearing up to celebrate Chinese New Year. The Telegraph’s China correspondent Sophia Yan returns to Wuhan and asks its residents whether all is really as it seems. Additional reporting by Mick Brown
Two uniformed guards wielding thermometers stand at the public entrance of what was once Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, and watch as I fumble with my phone.
To gain entry, they tell me to scan a QR code and register my details on a contacttracing platform. But my signal is weak and an error message flashes on my screen. I show it to them. ‘It’s not working.’
‘Just go in anyway,’ the guard replies, waving me through.
Upstairs is the recently renamed Heguang Eyeglass Market, an indoor shopping centre selling reading glasses and sunglasses. A blue sign reads: site disinfected daily at 8:25am. Dozens of salespeople rush over, inviting me into their empty shops – there are no other customers.
This used to be known as Huanan Eyeglass City. For years, locals could buy glasses upstairs and fresh fish downstairs, until coronavirus erupted here 12 months ago.
On New Year’s Eve 2019, health officials in Wuhan quietly announced a mystery illness affecting, so they said, a small number of people. Earlier that month, Ms Li*, 40, who has sold glasses in the market for more than a decade, had heard of a few seafood vendors downstairs catching something flu-like. Within days, the seafood market was cleared and disinfected. A week later, Huanan Eyeglass City shut too.
‘At first, they said it wasn’t contagious,’ she says. ‘But the dozen or so cases became a few hundred. So it was infectious, and that’s why the market closed. We were definitely worried.’
One year on, the seafood market remains sealed, though the blue corrugated metal sheets blocking it from the public have been replaced with prettier screens, decorated with Chinese landscape paintings, flanked by potted bamboo palms. Though the glasses shops upstairs have reopened, customers stay away. The stigma of coronavirus still infects the whole building.
Stallholders at the fruit market a few streets away report that business is bad there, too – more people order groceries online and many are reluctant to buy imported produce, like the fruits sold here. ‘Sales haven’t hit one-third of last year,’ says one of the traders, Wang Jing, 59. His voice drops to a whisper as he points at a man walking past: ‘His wife had it.’
From the start, conspiracy theories circulated about the origins of the virus. A World Health Organization (WHO) investigation due to start this month has suffered several setbacks. On 14 January, two members were barred by Chinese officials from boarding a final flight to Wuhan after apparently failing to meet Beijing’s health-screening requirements. The remaining 13 experts arrived as planned and are currently undergoing two weeks’ quarantine.
Meanwhile the Chinese government is adamant that the virus was brought into Wuhan from elsewhere. Last year, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian wrote online: ‘It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan… US owe us an explanation!’ State media amplified his claims, reporting that an athlete in the US military may have brought the virus to China during the Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan in October 2019.
Earlier this month, foreign minister Wang Yi reinforced the theory that Covid-19 was brought to China from overseas. ‘More and more research studies have shown that the pandemic is likely to have emerged in many places around the world,’ he told state broadcaster CCTV.
Authorities have variously claimed that the virus first occurred in Italy, Australia or India, or that it arrived on the contaminated packaging of imported seafood. The latter theory stuck, despite WHO findings that instances of the live virus on packaging appear to be ‘rare and isolated’.
But so effective is the propaganda machine that many people in China have grown wary of imported food. Stallholder Wang struggles to sell his stock of imported fruit, including golden kiwis from New Zealand, but he cautions me against buying them. ‘Eat domestic, don’t eat imports,’ he warns me. ‘I don’t even dare to do that.’
Seafood vendors, however, have suffered the most. Mr Chen*, who bought his stock from Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, has started selling meat instead. Lamb carcasses now hang on hooks in front of empty ice boxes that used to hold shrimp. ‘It’s hard to sell seafood these days. To anyone in the market business, this year hasn’t been good at all.’
Asked whether he believes coronavirus was linked to seafood imports, he scoffs. Before he can say more, three uniformed police officers appear and demand to see my ID. As I walk away, the officers follow me, making it impossible to speak to anyone else at the market – one of many attempts by Chinese authorities to silence Wuhan residents and ensure that nobody contradicts the Communist Party’s official narrative.
Outside the markets, life in Wuhan looks more normal – at least on the surface. Diners slurp hot-dry noodles, a local favourite, in canteens around the city, people gossip on the streets, and in the background is the clang of construction as buildings and metro stations continue to spring up.
Families picnic along the Yangtze River, which splices the city. Across the street from one crematorium, which at the peak of the pandemic was overrun, an underground mahjong parlour is back in action.
But the piles of road barriers and corrugated metal sheets that blocked streets and sealed residents inside their homes during full quarantine have yet to be fully cleared. Empty blue tents used by medical workers and local Party staff in hazmat suits can still be found across the city, flapping in the wind.
Face masks are still required in public places. Even so, social distancing is now a thing of the past. The one-metre markers to ensure people spaced out while queueing have been removed. Two sprawling field hospitals, which were built within days, their construction live-streamed to the world, remain standing but they have since closed, their entrances now secured by police.
In August, thousands of people flocked to a crowded pool party and music festival at Maya Beach Water Park in Wuhan. Photographs showed them frolicking in giant inflatables, not a face mask in sight.
When the photos went viral, prompting outrage in countries struggling to contain the virus, state-run newspaper Global Times dismissed the complaints as ‘sour grapes’. It was, the newspaper said, ‘a reminder to countries grappling with the virus that strict preventive measures have a payback’.
The message was clear: life in Wuhan is back to normal.
In Wuhan, 3,869 people died from the virus, 80 per cent of China’s total death toll, according to the authorities. But given how overwhelmed the hospitals were, as well as the multiple revisions to how cases were counted and the silencing of whistle-blowers, many don’t believe the official numbers.
Researchers in the US estimate that the
‘We don’t just face the threat of the virus; we face the dual threat of virus and politics’
city’s death toll could be at least 10 times higher, though figures remain unconfirmed and are based on collated media reports. What is known is that at the peak of the pandemic, a worker told The Telegraph that there were 5,000 bodies waiting for urgent cremation at just one of Wuhan’s eight crematoria – a far cry from two dozen or so cremations per day before the outbreak.
New research by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 500,000 of Wuhan’s 11 million population may have been infected with Covid-19 – almost 10 times more than the officially released figure of 50,354.
Some businesses have closed for good since the city’s 76-day lockdown, which ended in April. Small-scale protests have erupted in Wuhan and some other cities, with shopkeepers and workers demanding reduced rent or back wages, but police are quick to put a stop to them.
On paper, China’s economy – the secondbiggest in the world – appears to have bounced back after an initial virus slump, with growth of 4.9 per cent reported between July and September 2020 compared to the previous year. But the numbers reflect unproductive growth, such as infrastructure investment, which experts say won’t recoup costs. And they fail to capture in Wuhan, and across the country, China’s gig economy – the millions of people who used to work odd jobs as drivers, maids and shop attendants who now struggle to find shifts.
‘Business has definitely taken a hit. I used to make a few hundred yuan more each day,’ says Wan Dong, 31, a taxi driver.
Streets are quieter – many itinerant workers from other parts of China who went home for Chinese New Year never returned. ‘A lot of my friends lost their jobs so I had to pack and ship their belongings,’ adds Wan. ‘We can’t really return to the way it used to be.’
Along with mandatory face masks, detailed contact-tracing programmes and temperature checks still take place in public areas, including shopping centres and on public transport.
This has become the norm across China.
All this, even though Wuhan hasn’t reported a locally transmitted coronavirus infection since mid-may. Cluster outbreaks, however, continue to flare up across the country. On 14 January, a Covid-related death was officially reported in Hebei province – the first in mainland China since last May. While these are rarely more than a few dozen cases a day, authorities declare ‘wartime mode’, lockdown entire districts, conduct mass testing and quarantine millions.
‘We still have to be careful,’ says Ms Qin*, 55, out walking her two dogs. ‘These last few months I haven’t ridden the subway much; it’s too crowded and I’m still a little scared.’
On 31 December 2019, the day before Huanan Seafood Market was closed and disinfected, Wuhan health officials announced that 27 people had become ill with ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’.
Nine days later, the first person died of Covid-19: a 61-year-old man who had been
a regular customer at the market. It would take authorities two days to announce it.
Over the next few weeks, the Chinese government largely stayed silent. Wuhan officials hosted a lavish Chinese New Year banquet attended by tens of thousands of people. The mayor of Wuhan, Zhou Xianwang, made no public mention of a health crisis brewing.
In early January, grandmother Chen Min, 65, was turned away from three hospitals in Wuhan, after presenting with a fever and cough. Doctors diagnosed a cold. She was not tested for the mystery disease spreading through the city, nor quarantined, even when a CT scan showed shadows on her lungs, now recognised as a pattern among those with Covid-19. By the time she went into isolation on 15 January, her condition was critical. Six hours later she died. To this day, her stepson, Kyle Hui, 40, hasn’t told his seven-year-old son that ‘nainai’ – grandma – is gone.
‘I was scared,’ says Hui. ‘Even medical staff in protective gear were afraid to help her. [But before then] my father was in close contact with her, and no one told us at the time that she was highly infectious.’
As no test was given, Chen’s death wasn’t included in the government’s official Covid19 death toll, though doctors have since said it was ‘highly likely’ the cause.
Like many others who became ill, she hadn’t visited the seafood market. Medical staff were also getting sick. Both were strong indications that the disease was highly transmissible between humans and yet authorities still said nothing. By 20 January, when President Xi Jinping finally made his first public comments about the virus, demanding ‘allout’ efforts to handle it, infections had spread to Thailand, Japan and South Korea.
Three days later, travel from Wuhan was halted as the city went into lockdown. Shortly afterwards, the rest of Hubei province followed suit. For many in Wuhan, the lockdown announcement was the first time they learnt of the outbreak.
‘We didn’t know much about the virus at all then,’ said Yao Qing, 44, a former business consultant. ‘We wondered if we could get infected if we [stayed at home and] simply opened our windows. At the time, we didn’t have any disinfectant supplies at home – there was no time to stock up.’
By then, Covid had spread to all but two of China’s 33 provinces, including Hong Kong and Macau.
The timing of the outbreak in Wuhan could not have been worse. Chinese New Year began on 25 January, when the nation’s 1.4 billion people travel to celebrate with friends and family. More than five million people had already left Wuhan for the weeklong holiday.
Andrew Tatem, professor of geography and environmental science at the University of
Southampton, and director of Worldpop, which maps population movements, estimates that had lockdowns been imposed on Wuhan three weeks earlier, there would have been a 95 per cent reduction in the number of cases in mainland China by the end of February.
‘The virus spreads fast, and acting early can have a big impact, but it’s hard to know if that would have been enough to stop it spreading locally,’ he says. ‘There are countries all over the world that had far longer than three weeks, and still did not manage to stop the virus spreading.’
As cases multiplied, Wuhan was gripped with rising fear and frenzy. People cleared shop shelves of face masks, hand gel, soap and cleaning products. Stores in the US were mobbed as people rushed to buy supplies and send them to relatives in China.
Expats began evacuating on charter flights arranged by embassies; then diplomats also departed.
Meanwhile authorities continued to silence whistle-blowers. During one week in late January, at least 254 people were punished for ‘spreading rumours’, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a network of rights groups. Others were detained by police for attempting to archive censored content. Thousands were given detention, fines and verbal warnings.
Gao Fei, 32, was detained for eight days after trying to organise face-mask donations to alleviate shortages. ‘They did not [want to] hear that we were short of resources,’ he says. ‘As soon as you post something like that [online], they panic… We don’t just face the threat of the virus; we face the dual threat of virus and politics.’
Zhao Lei’s father, a retired civil servant, who was 65, contracted a fever on 29 January.
‘The government committed murder, and for that officials should be punished’
At first, it seemed he had a cold, but she was alarmed when he started gasping for breath. As no ambulances were available, the family, desperate, asked the local neighbourhood Party committee for assistance. ‘About half an hour later, they took my father to hospital on a rickshaw,’ she says.
Her father died while he was waiting in the emergency room. ‘We didn’t know it could be that bad. There was nothing on television or online, nothing reported about patients in the hospital, which were full of dead bodies. [The government] concealed the truth in the early days and didn’t tell people in Wuhan that this could be contagious,’ she says. ‘We went out to eat and shop as usual, and didn’t socially distance or take protective measures, so we were all exposed.’
On 7 February, Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who had been punished for sounding the alarm about Covid-19 back in December, died of coronavirus. He was 34. Until then, experts had observed the virus seemed to mostly affect the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions.
As news of his death spread, a surge of anger against the government peaked in China, overwhelming censors. Public memorials to Dr Li were removed but more than a million comments remain posted on his social media account. ‘People are prone to forget,’ wrote one, ‘but I will remember you, not just because you are a martyr, but because of your character and your actions.’
The day after Dr Li’s death, China’s Covid death toll surpassed the 800 fatalities that had occurred during the Sars outbreak in 2002 – an epidemic that may have been exacerbated by an alleged Beijing cover-up.
The lockdown in Wuhan was ruthlessly enforced. Authorities taped seals around people’s homes, at times chaining them inside. Alarms alerted neighbourhood Party workers every time a door was opened – the only reasons permitted were to receive a package or put rubbish outside the door for people in hazmat suits to collect. Only vehicles with permits were allowed on the roads, mainly for delivering food and necessities. People were jailed or fined if caught without a face mask or for violating quarantine.
Those with chronic illnesses, including cancer and kidney disease, weren’t allowed out to seek medical care. ‘Everyone [in the hospital] was assigned to work on the front line – we didn’t have a choice,’ says a nurse who did not want to be named. The only other possibility was to resign. She recalls that overcrowding was so severe that it was impossible to isolate confirmed Covid-19 patients from those with suspected cases.
Families arrived with bundles of cash, pleading with doctors for help. Not knowing where to turn, some people jumped off buildings and died.
‘Money wasn’t worth anything at the time,’ recalls taxi driver Wan Dong. ‘All we knew was that people were dying all the time, sometimes alone at home.’
Hao Fangming, 27, an office worker, fled Wuhan hours after lockdown was announced and before it kicked in. ‘I arrived around 4am at Wuchang station, bought the first ticket to my hometown, Zhengzhou, and left,’ he says. He spent the next 21 days sequestered in his family home and was required to report his temperature twice a day. Officials visited at odd hours to check he was indoors.
Elsewhere, people were increasingly concerned that those who had fled Wuhan would bring the virus to them. Nearly 600 miles away in the city of Guilin, people who had travelled there from Hubei province – of which Wuhan is the capital – were forced to use separate designated public toilets and parking spaces, causing uproar online.
To the West, China’s lockdowns seemed draconian, but many Wuhan residents praised the government’s handling of the crisis.
‘For years, foreign countries have criticised China for being authoritarian, with people living without freedoms,’ says Hao. ‘But the biggest advantage is that in an emergency, China can speak with one voice.’
He supported the government’s decision to reprimand Dr Li Wenliang for whistleblowing. ‘A big part of their responsibility is to maintain public order.’
Pan Zhilling, 52, a waitress, agrees. ‘China has done much better than other countries. It’s already curbed coronavirus. America’s done so poorly – so many people have died. Everything here now is pretty much fine, not at all what it’s like abroad.’
There are, however, some dissenters. Yao Qing is attempting to sue the Chinese authorities, arguing that sealing the city was illegal, forcing the public to pay for the government’s mistakes. When the pandemic first broke out, she began wearing a face mask after hearing rumours about a virus spreading through the city. After a few days, when no new cases had been reported, she stopped wearing it. ‘Lots of people stopped, so I took mine off, too,’ she says. ‘The government’s