Wuhan was at the center of international news for weeks and weeks earlier this year. Then, when the coronavirus was discovered gradually in all countries of the world, the news from the Chinese metropolis from which the pandemic is thought to have started became more and more sporadic. Peter Hessler, an American journalist who is an expert on China, was there for a few days, talking about the atmosphere in a long article published by New Yorker. Life in the city today has returned to “relative normality”, as they say, which is much more normal than that of most European countries: no infections have been recorded for months, and the events involving gatherings have also slowly resumed indoors, from disco evenings to matches in sports halls with the public.
Wuhan Station after the Golden Week holidays, a national holiday period, on October 8th. (Getty Images)
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Between January 23 and April 8, Wuhan was subjected to a lockdown very hard, as would not be seen even in countries that took the most severe measures such as Italy. Everyone in town remembers the most important dates of last spring, says Hessler. They are mentioned in words fengcheng, “Sealed city”, e jiefeng, “Remove the seal”.
The images of coronavirus-positive inhabitants dragged out of their homes by state officials dressed in overalls and masks generated controversy abroad and suffering among those who suffered them. Architect Kyle Hui told Hessler that his mother died of COVID-19 in January. After reaching the city for the cremation ceremony, Hui returned home to Jiangsu Province. A few days later Wuhan was placed in lockdown, and a group of officials sealed the door with tape indicating that he had been there recently. At first Hui protested, but was told that he would alternatively be taken to an isolation center.
It happened almost everywhere in China: even in Chengdu, over a thousand kilometers away, where Hessler lives. Officials went several times a day to ask if anyone had been in the province of Hubei, Wuhan: in the Hessler district they found a person who had recently returned, tested him and tested positive, even if he had no symptoms. Over time he became convinced that those very strict measures were necessary, he told Hessler.
After a few weeks of delays and confusion (and cover-ups, many clues say) due to the panic of the discovery of a new viral pneumonia, the contact tracing and organized isolation in China were massive, starting in mid-January. Ten thousand people were put to work in Wuhan alone to do epidemiological investigations and contact tracing; health workers lived for months in the hotel; many buildings and rooms were adapted to ensure spacing and places to keep positives in isolation.
7,000 students at the inauguration of Huazhong University on 4 September. (Getty Images)
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A construction contractor told Hessler that workers were earning the equivalent of hundreds of dollars a day during those weeks due to the risk of contagion and grueling hours. The wages went up to $ 7,000 in a week, and there were still not enough people willing to work. At one point, the impresario decided to stay with them on the construction sites to prove that there were no dangers. In reality he didn’t even know it, because at the beginning the official communications were very fragmentary.
The official death toll in Wuhan is 3,869, but an infectious disease expert who worked in the city told Hessler he believes they were up to three or four times as many. For a long time many sick and many dead were not tested (something that happened almost everywhere in the world, even in Italy). The official toll in the rest of China is extraordinarily lower: in Beijing there are only 9 deaths. It is not known how reliable the Chinese data are, but certainly the disastrous management of the first weeks of the epidemic in Wuhan caused many deaths, which elsewhere were avoided thanks to the very strict measures applied later.
In Wuhan, however, a case of local coronavirus transmission has not been recorded since May 18. Hessler writes that it is the most tested city in China – “I have never met a taxi driver who has not swabbed at least twice” – with its 321 dedicated centers and so many operators that in June about seventy were sent to Beijing for help contain the epidemic. Cinemas are open today in Wuhan, as are discos, and there are no particular restrictions on seating in restaurants. People wear masks everywhere, but otherwise there are no great measures to avoid crowding and ensure spacing. The beginning of the academic year was celebrated with ceremonies with thousands of students in enclosed spaces, for example. Hessler also took his sunglasses to repair at the covered fish market, the place where the infection is thought to have started.
In reality, it is not certain that the infection started from the Wuhan fish market. There, the first cases of the mysterious pneumonia were discovered, and the fact that live wild animals were being sold has led to speculation that the coronavirus made the famous spillover, the passing of species. In reality, in that market there were few stalls where live animals were sold, because in Wuhan they don’t eat many of them. They are more popular in other cities, such as Guangdong, and indeed there are those who believe that the pandemic may have started there.
Construction workers have lunch at a restaurant on 16 September. (Getty Images)
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Peter Daszak, a coronavirus scientist who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years, explained to Hessler that he believes the virus was circulating weeks before it was discovered on the market. In Wuhan in winter there are few bats, animals that most likely were among them which brought the coronavirus to humans (although it is believed that the last animal in the chain may have been a pangolin).
– Read also: Will we ever know where the coronavirus came from?
According to his research, more than a million people in Southeast Asia are infected with coronaviruses that come from bats every year. “Usually these are people who live near the caves where there are bats, who move around at night defecating and urinating. Feces and urine end up on surfaces or clothes, and someone touches them and then puts their hands to their mouths, ”Daszak explained.
There are those who say that more certain evidence could have been had to reconstruct the origin of the infection if the Wuhan market had been treated differently after the discovery of the infections. But that’s normal, Daszak explained: if a new virus is discovered, doctors are sent, who first of all think about cleaning the area and stopping the infections.
A widespread conspiracy theory says that it was the Wuhan Institute of Virology that created the virus, which then escaped from the laboratory. There is no evidence that anything like this has happened, and indeed it seems very unlikely. Scientists in China are under enormous pressure to publish their findings, Daszak explained, and if a coronavirus such as the one that causes COVID-19, capable of infecting humans, had been discovered, it would certainly have been disclosed. Foreign scientists were continually invited to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, testifying that no secret experiments were in progress. Not surprisingly, the Institute was very quick to publish the genome sequence of the virus, to allow the rest of the world to work on it.
A Wuhan nightclub on September 18th. (Getty Images)
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The problem was not the reaction of scientists in Wuhan, but that of local politics, which initially tried to cover up the findings on the extent of the infection and the severity of the disease caused by the virus. This is a frequent dynamic in China: when they realized they had made a mistake in assessing what was happening, officials tried not to let their superiors know. But among the experts there are still those who recognize that managing a situation of those proportions, without knowing anything, was very difficult. According to Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, she told Hessler that “it is unrealistic to think that any country would have been able to stop this virus at its origin.”
A Wuhan reporter told Hessler that in the first weeks of January working in a newspaper had something unusual compared to usual: there was a freedom never seen before, so much so that stories such as that of Li Wenliang, a doctor who was among the first to raise the alarm about the coronavirus and was silenced by the Chinese government for this (he later died in February, after being infected). As early as February, things changed, and the government imposed a very strict censorship.
The reporter explained that many scientists and officials who worked to contain the epidemic refused to speak, saying that perhaps they will tell what they know in ten years, if the climate has changed in the meantime. According to Hessler, after a few years, we will slowly discover many more things about those weeks of January in Wuhan: «but this delay is important for the Chinese Communist Party. He manages history as he handled the pandemic: a period of isolation is crucial ».
A charity basketball game organized on October 4 in Wuhan, with the public. (GettyImages)
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By asking his interlocutors what the epidemic left to the city, Hessler received very different answers, from those who came out more wary of the government to those who are more confident. But the past few months, everyone said, confirmed many things we know about China. A country where the state has never felt the need to explain to its citizens in detail what was happening, knowing that the population was willing to accept very severe measures to help contain the virus. If it had gone the way it did in the United States, in proportion, China would have had over a million deaths.
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