![]() A number of writers documented the quarantine in online journals, the most famous being “ Wuhan Diary,” by Fang Fang, a novelist in her sixties. ![]() In Wuhan, the official death toll is 3,869, although many believe that the actual figure is significantly higher. The second-hardest-hit Chinese city is a place that few outsiders have heard of: Xiaogan, some forty miles from Wuhan, where a hundred and twenty-nine people died. In all of Guangdong Province-population a hundred and thirteen million-the death toll is eight. Thus far, Beijing has reported nine coronavirus deaths, two more than Shanghai. It was a combination of timing and policy: because the pandemic first spread in Wuhan, and the initial coverup and other missteps were followed by effective national policies, the city was unique in its suffering. There’s no other country where the pandemic’s effects have been so concentrated in a single city while everywhere else remained relatively untouched. More than eleven million people live in Wuhan, the capital of landlocked Hubei Province. Since then, the Chinese government has released little information about the Huanan site or the possible origins of the disease. But at that point the virus was already out in the world-there was no longer any possibility of cutting it off at the source. It took another ten days for the government to shut the second-floor market twelve days later, all of Wuhan was placed in quarantine and then, within two more days, almost every province had declared a first-level public-health emergency. Upstairs, people kept selling eyeglasses. On January 1st, workers in hazmat suits arrived, taking samples and disinfecting some parts of the market. It consisted of more than a thousand stalls that, in addition to seafood, sold freshwater fish and meat, along with some that specialized in live wild animals. A few days later, the police compelled Li to sign a confession that his warning had constituted “illegal behavior.”īy then, the government had closed the downstairs market. Somebody posted screenshots of Li’s messages online, and that evening health officials summoned him for questioning. The day before the report, an ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang had sent a series of warnings to a WeChat group of former medical-school classmates. In fact, Wuhan physicians had already seen colleagues getting sick. But the over-all message was reassuring: “The investigation so far has not found obvious human-to-human transmission, and no medical staff infection has been found.” The report noted that scientists were studying an unknown type of “ viral pneumonia” that had infected twenty-seven people who were associated with the seafood market. Since then, fish and eyeglasses had coexisted peacefully, until the last day of December, when the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a report confirming a series of rumors. Locals told me that, more than fifteen years ago, some eyeglass merchants had been attracted by the low rent. There had never been any logic to the Huanan combo: fish downstairs, eyeglasses upstairs. We climbed a steep flight of stairs, past a freshly painted sign that said “Heguang Eyeglasses Market.” Back in December, it had been Huanan Eyeglass City, like the market on the ground floor. ![]() “But no photographs.”Īnother guard was assigned to accompany me. But the market’s second floor was open for business, which was why, when I returned, I brought the glasses. The site remained sensitive, and a high blue wall blocked off the ground-floor stalls where the virus had spread. During my first visit, a week earlier, I had left after attracting the attention of a man who appeared to be a plainclothes police officer. The earliest documented clusters of coronavirus infections had occurred in the Huanan market. I handed over the sunglasses and explained that they needed to be repaired. number, and the guards seemed uncertain what to do with a foreigner. The system, though, required a national I.D. They examined my passport, checked my temperature, and asked me to scan a QR code that connected to a registration system. It was late August, and three security guards in black uniforms sat at the entrance. On my second visit to the site of the former Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, at the intersection of New China Road and Development Road, in central Wuhan, I wore a mask and a pair of sunglasses with a loose frame.
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