The official lockdown in Wuhan, China, the first city majorly impacted by the novel coronavirus, has finally been lifted. People are cautiously returning to their normal lives, but it’s not a celebratory parade. Instead, the first day without the strict lockdown regulations looks like a community slowly remembering what life before the virus looked like.
People aren’t congregating in large numbers, still. Face masks and six-foot distancing are still the norm. Some shops are reopening, but many people are opting to get their goods to go. Takeout will likely be the main way people get their food for the foreseeable future in Wuhan. But, after months, the worst is over for the city.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest, it was in Wuhan, China. The city of 11 million people is not some small farming village. It is a major cultural hub in Central China. The Asian country has seen 81,802 confirmed COVID cases, and reported some 3,300 deaths. The bulk of these cases and deaths came from Wuhan.
As the virus outbreak began, China moved quickly to lockdown and isolate Wuhan to prevent the aggressive spread of the virus. According to official reporting, this plan seems to have worked. While the US has seen the COVID-19 death toll hit 10,000, China managed to keep their death toll to a third of that number. It’s likely that aggressive lockdown measures led to this disparity.
Wuhan’s lockdown, which was initiated on January 23, has served as a template for other countries and cities as they’ve battled the novel coronavirus. Italy and Spain, two other hard-hit countries, have enacted shelter-in-place orders like Wuhan in order to slow the spread of the virus in their own borders.
After their aggressive moves in containing the virus, the Chinese government’s response in Wuhan seemed to work. New cases slowed down, and the initially overwhelmed medical system slowly got the situation under control. The US, which has rapidly become the new epicenter for the virus, has made moves to mirror Wuhan’s response.
Namely, the US has focused on the issue of health care for senior citizens. People over 65 are at the highest risk of dying from the novel coronavirus disease, so special attention has been given to this vulnerable section of the population. As the US looks ahead, we could see a relaxing of our own social distancing measures by as soon as the end of April. There may just be a light at the end of the tunnel after all.
