Advertisement
Why residents of Wuhan, the city where pandemic started, began to question China’s Covid-19 strategy
- China’s top leadership abandoned the country’s zero-Covid strategy in early December
- But few of those aged 80 and above had received booster shots of Covid-19 vaccine
Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
76
About 10 million residents of Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first reported, endured a 76-day lockdown from January 2020 to contain the virus that causes the disease. Such responses became a key pillar of China’s zero-Covid policy, but another wave of infection hit the city three years later when the authorities pivoted to living with the virus. In the first of a three-part series on the anniversary of the lockdown, Sylvia Ma looks at why Wuhan residents now have a more critical view of the zero-Covid policy.
Wuhan teacher Mary Ma was surprised to learn last January that no one in her son’s office in Canada was too worried about getting infected with the Omicron variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 and that their lives had largely returned to normal.
The 52-year-old then began to have doubts about the way the epidemic was being handled at home after seeing shops, including one she had frequented for years, close down at the height of China’s strict zero-Covid strategy. She started to wonder whether such restrictions were going overboard.
Advertisement
“I started to question whether such measures were really for controlling Covid-19 or meeting political needs,” Ma said.
Her doubts about government priorities only deepened after infections spiked in Wuhan, the capital of central China’s Hubei province, when the country pivoted to living with the virus and her husband, a doctor, told her about the strains on the healthcare system. She said she had seen more deaths recently than three years ago, when the city was the first to witness the emergence of the disease.
05:12
No longer afraid: people in Chinese city of Wuhan begin to leave Covid pandemic behind
No longer afraid: people in Chinese city of Wuhan begin to leave Covid pandemic behind
“Why would we suffer for three years if we eventually come to live with the virus? I am all for opening, but I felt it could be achieved at a more suitable time or in a better way,” Ma said. “Wouldn’t it be better if we reopened last spring and lived through the wave in summer?”
Advertisement
Advertisement
Select Voice
Select Speed
1.00x