Wuhan, the city with the first outbreak of coronavirus Covid-19, celebrated the arrival of the New Year in 2021 last night and this morning. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping praised his leadership of the “epic” fight against the epidemic in his New Year’s message. More than 1.8 million people have died from coronavirus infections worldwide.
According to an AFP report from Wuhan, jubilant crowds released balloons in front of the clock tower of the Wuhan customs building after the clock struck 12 midnight. The customs building is one of the historical sites of Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people.
We survived
The year 2020 was a very difficult year for us because we suffered from the epidemic, especially in Wuhan, and we will never forget it,” said a Wuhan resident named XU DU, phonetically speaking, to AFP. We were quarantined for months (…), but we survived.”
Wuhan was released from quarantine in early April. But Wuhaners still remain cautious. On New Year’s Eve, most Wuhan residents wore masks. Speaking to AFP, a female Wuhan resident named Li Yusu, phonetically, said, “China has done a good job of controlling the outbreak. But there are still other countries affected by the virus. I hope they can get rid of it soon.
Wuhan saw the emergence of a new coronavirus at the end of 2019, and the World health Organization office in Beijing was notified on Dec. 31 of the same year. The Chinese government began quarantining Wuhan and its province Hubei on January 23, 2020, but the move failed to stop the virus from spreading to all four corners of the globe, which has now killed more than 1.8 million people.
10 times higher than the official figure
In China itself, the outbreak was brought under control in the spring, with authorities announcing the country’s last death from coronavirus infection in mid-May, AFP said. China recorded a total of 4,634 coronavirus deaths and more than 87,000 infections nationwide, according to official figures released Friday, Jan. 1. The vast majority of these cases were seen in Wuhan.
According to a serological study released this week by China’s Ministry of Health, more than 4 percent of Wuhan’s residents carry antibodies to the coronavirus. Relative to the city’s population, that means nearly 500,000 people in Wuhan are infected with the coronavirus, 10 times more than the official 50,000 infected people announced.
The AFP report said the Communist regime was criticized for its lack of transparency at the start of the outbreak. A WHO team is expected to arrive in China in early January to investigate the source of the coronavirus.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, for his part, described their fight against the outbreak as an “epic” in a New Year’s Day speech to the Chinese on Thursday evening.
Citizen journalist volunteers jailed
It was also reported that those who sought the truth about the epidemic and tried to work against Xi Jinping in writing his “epic” against the epidemic have been severely repressed. For example, citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who went into Wuhan to report on the epidemic, was just sentenced to four years in prison by a court in Pudong, Shanghai. Citizen journalists Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin have also been detained.
Three post-90s in Beijing were placed under residential surveillance for storing officially deleted articles about the epidemic. According to Wikipedia, Endpoint volunteers Chen Mei, Cai Wei, and his girlfriend Tang were detained by police and placed under residential surveillance on “suspicion of provocation and harboring. Endpoint Star is a site built on the GitHub open platform that uses crowdsourcing to back up articles deleted by WeChat, Weibo and other platforms. During the epidemic, Endpoint Star backed up many of the deleted reports and commentaries, many of which were official reports. Some online analysis suggests that these post-90s practices prevented the “rewriting of history.
Recent Comments