Coronavirus crisis: Panic and fear inside Wuhan lock down
Crystal Reid, Wuhan
January 24 2020, 9:00am,
The Times
Workers use infrared thermometers to check the temperature of passengers arriving by train.
It took less than 12 hours to shake Alan Laine’s faith that Beijing had the coronavirus outbreak under control.
The 57-year-old British expat who has taught physics in international schools in Wuhan for 20 years was shocked at how fast the Communist authorities isolated an entire city overnight. “It happened so quickly and without warning. [It] has caused panic and suggests it’s more serious than we know,” he said.
The 11 million residents of Wuhan, birthplace of the virus that has already killed 25 people according to official numbers, went to bed on Wednesday unaware that hundreds of armed soldiers were about to surround the airport and railway station and set up checkpoints to seal the city from the outside world.
The authorities announced the lockdown in the middle of the night as families lay sleeping. They awoke to discover that all trains were cancelled, all flights grounded and all roads out of the city were blocked by 10am.
Those who rose early rushed to leave before the deadline. Those who stayed descended on supermarkets to strip shelves bare of everything from face masks to vegetables, with fights breaking out over the last bag of rice or final carton of milk.
The move to quarantine a city of this size is unprecedented in the modern history of epidemics. Yesterday Beijing announced that a further nine cities — Huanggang, Ezhou, Chibi, Xiantao, Zhejiang, Qianjiang, Huangshi, Enshi and Xianning — would face the same fate, albeit to varying degrees.
By mid-morning in Wuhan trucks were roaming the streets spraying disinfectant into every corner while masked lines of soldiers stood outside the entrances of transport hubs. All pedestrians were ordered by police to wear face masks.
“We are feeling as though it is the end of the world,” one Wuhan resident said on China’s Weibo social media site, expressing concerns about shortages of food and cleaning products. Shi Chengwei, a local driver, said: “The new pneumonia is our new common enemy.”
The transformation in the space of a day was extraordinary. On Wednesday, on the eve of the lockdown, Wuhan felt like a ghost town. Except for a few masked residents making the last run to the shops before the official start of the lunar new year festivities, there was little sense of danger or urgency. At the main train station families and migrant workers had jostled with their luggage, embarking on the annual mass exodus to their home towns. The local government had only advised against unnecessary travel in and out of the city. Twelve hours later everything changed.
Even Mr Laine — who lived in Wuhan during the Sars outbreak in 2003 that left 774 dead across Asia — had not believed that the government would lock down the city. “This won’t be anything like that,” he had told
The Times in an earlier discussion about the potentially fatal respiratory infection that was first detected in Wuhan on December 31. “You’re more likely to die crossing the road.”
Most of the 830 confirmed cases across China and 23 of the 25 deaths happened in Hubei, the central province in which Wuhan is located. However, today it was announced that a second person had died outside the virus epicentre, 1,200 miles from Wuhan in the northern province of Heilongjiang, close to the Russian border. Other cases have been reported in the United States, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong and Macau but most of these can be traced back to Wuhan.
A private messaging group for expats in the city is busy. Every minute videos, official updates and rumours are circulated across the group. Some make light of their predicament with memes of tin-hat wearers; others are not in a joking mood. “We’re in fear for our lives here!” remarks one woman in response to another member’s cheerful post about being refunded her £30 cancelled train ticket.
Adam Kamradt-Scott, a global health specialist at Sydney University, has been monitoring the spread of the virus. While he applauds the Chinese government for taking “unusual and rare” measures to quell the spread of the infection, he is worried that it is too little too late. “If the virus is already largely contained to Wuhan, this is a good public health measure to try to prevent and slow down the spread, particularly with the mass migration at Chinese new year. If the virus is already out of the bag and seeing community transmission in other cities, however, it’s effectively pointless and giving a false sense of security.”
Hours before the lockdown there were no extra screening measures at the airport. Now no one can even enter the terminal, let alone leave the city.
Originally Posted by arsenal
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