Security personnel check people at the entrance to Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan, Jan. 23, 2020.
Three hours before Wuhan was closed, Lai Xuewen fled the epidemic-ridden city with his family.
“We were the last few to flee,” he said, “and it was a frightening night.”
At 2 a.m. on Jan. 23, the day before New Year’s Eve on the Chinese lunar calendar, the Wuhan City Epidemic Prevention and Control Command suddenly issued a city closure notice.
From 10:00 a.m. on January 23, 2020, the city’s city buses, subways, ferries and long-distance passenger transport suspended operations; without special reasons, the public should not leave Wuhan, and the airport and railway station were temporarily closed to leave the Han channel. Resumption time will be announced separately.
Lai Xuewen’s home is located in Hankou, the center of the outbreak, and a few kilometers away is the Jinyintan Hospital, the designated hospital for patients with CCP virus pneumonia.
At 3 a.m., he picked up his grandmother and parents-in-law, took a lot of trouble to get a cab, and made a hasty run to Tianhe Airport.
The city of Wuhan seems to be an empty city with very few cars on the streets, and when I arrived at the airport at 4:30am, I realized that it was full of people.
“The busiest part of the city was the airport, and people were fleeing late at night when they learned of the closure, and they all felt like something big was going to happen,” he told the Voice of America.
Half an hour after arriving at the airport, a message came on his phone: the airport highway was closed.
In the early hours of the 23rd, long lines also formed at the Wuhan high-speed railway station, with many people trying to change their tickets, once causing chaos.
That morning, Mr. Lv, who works in a bank in Wuhan, drove his private car to send his wife and children to their hometown in Chibi, more than 120 kilometers away, before the city was closed. For many Chinese, the epidemic is not as deeply rooted as “going home for the New Year”.
But in this huge city of 11 million people, those who could escape were a minority, and the vast majority had to stay in the walled city.
After learning the news of the city closure, a Uyghur girl who went to university in Wuhan cried. She called her parents in Xinjiang and told them she couldn’t go home for New Year’s Eve.
“Opened the video afraid to show their faces, afraid that my parents see me crying wretched look. For the first time, I spent New Year’s Eve alone, with no classmates, no friends, no family, no food storage,” she said on Sina Weibo.
On this day, Zhang Yi, a 54-year-old low-income household in Wuhan, had a sleepless night. 81-year-old mother is bedridden, needs care for three meals a day, and has a child in college. There are not many dishes left in the house, only a mouthpiece.
A day ago, the Wuhan city government stipulated that people must wear masks in public places, but it was no longer possible to buy masks on the street. Zhang Yi was worried, how would he go out now?
“This country is in complete chaos, officials are only accountable to the top, not the bottom, and we are all leeks,” he told the Voice of America.
Zhang Yi’s home is less than three kilometers in a straight line from the South China Seafood Market. It is thought to be the source of the sudden outbreak of pneumonia caused by a Communist virus.
The mysterious virus, first discovered last December, has now spread to 23 provinces and municipalities in mainland China and Macau, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Chinese Communist Party officials say the virus has now infected more than 600 people and killed at least 17.
But many believe that officials are hiding the true numbers.
Fang Bin, a 54-year-old Wuhan resident, told the Voice of America that the Hankou Hospital near his home is overcrowded every day and that it is impossible to count the true number of people who have been sick, many of whom die in a hurry before they are diagnosed.
“There are people who he was already in poor health, and when they get sick, they carry on and collapse when they walk down the road,” he said.
Videos circulating on the Internet show long lines of patients at a local hospital, with medical staff in protective suits shouting to maintain order, ordering people to “keep quiet” and “get in line at the door.
Mr. Liu, a practitioner in the financial industry in Wuhan, said that the city’s medical resources are clearly inadequate, to see a doctor to queue for five or six hours, but only to check the temperature, take a CT, the symptoms are not obvious to go home to self-isolation, which is also the hidden danger of disease transmission.
“That tangible fear can only be felt on the ground,” he said.
China’s state television reported on the 23rd that Wuhan had “entered a full state of war and implemented wartime measures to resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.” The report also said Wuhan had an ample supply of all kinds of agricultural and sideline products and would also increase the supply of masks and other prevention and control products, so people did not need to stock up on masks.
On the first day of the city closure, Fang Bin went around the streets and the city’s buses and subways had been halted. The highway out of the city was closed. Some people tried to leave the city by side roads, but the side roads were also blocked. Around 8 or 9 a.m., a mad rush began at supermarkets. “A cabbage was more than 30, and it was only two dollars,” he said. The stall owner at the vegetable market told him that the market would be closed tomorrow and that he would have to wait for notice when it would open. The street masks are already off the market.
Because of the suddenness of the incident, Fang Bin feels that most citizens are still confused and do not seem to have reacted to what is going on, and some are not even aware of the news of the city closure.
Some people didn’t even know about the closure. “Because it’s been said before that it’s preventable and controllable, that it won’t spread from person to person, that it’s not SARS, people didn’t take it seriously, and then suddenly the city was closed,” he said.
On the day of the city closure in Wuhan, Sina Weibo was still flooded with various posts that were officially seen as spreading positive energy.
“Having battled a huge flood in 1998 and ‘SARS’ in 2003, Wuhan is a city that is brave enough to face difficulties and keep overcoming them,” said a poster posted on the official account of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily.
Wen Xiang, a Chinese Canadian scholar of literature and history who has been closely following the progress of the epidemic, said that Wuhan pneumonia has evolved to the point where “citizens are running around in a wretched state” and yet officials are still trying to steer public opinion. It’s just the same old story – praise the Party and government for stepping in to control the epidemic in time; unite closely around the Party and government and fight the epidemic for all.
“The final credit goes to the Party and the government for leading 1.4 billion people to a comprehensive victory over the epidemic and a successful conclusion,” he said, adding, “That must be the rhythm, another Spring Festival gala.”
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