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As the coronavirus claimed its millionth life, people in Wuhan expressed sadness on Monday at the continued global impact of the pandemic, more than nine months after it emerged in the central Chinese city.
Pride in the city’s resilience in the face of calamity is tinged with sadness at the rising death toll elsewhere.
“One million people killed, perhaps relatively speaking in terms of the total world population, is not much,” said Hu Lingquan, a scientist and a Wuhan resident.
“But these are actually the lives of real people,” he told AFP.
“Each person has a family.”
On Monday, the children held their parents’ hands as they made their way to school through rush-hour traffic in the near-normal city.
As the global death toll reaches one million, and with resistance to the threat of further closures from London and Madrid to Melbourne, China has been celebrating its exit from the virus.
The economy is recovering, factories reopened and consumers returned to stores, the epidemic quelled by months of strict general closures and massive testing and contact tracing.
Wuhan, China’s central city and ground zero for the virus, has flaunted its rebound with packed pool parties and bustling amusement parks.
But that lens has malfunctioned in a world still struggling to control the spread of the virus and the economic consequences, while holding China to account for the causes of the outbreak.
The virus was felt strongly in the city of 11 million with 50,340 confirmed cases and 3,869 deaths, the highest number of infections and deaths in China.
But there have been no new cases in the city since May, and many in Wuhan now question the global response to a pandemic that China appears to have successfully quelled for now.
Beijing has also raised questions about the origin story of the Wuhan outbreak, sparking outrage from the worst affected nations, led by US President Donald Trump, who refers to the disease as the “China virus.”
“From China’s point of view, they have done really badly,” said scientist Hu.
“Maybe they never really understood how serious this is.”
The World Health Organization warns that the death toll will continue to rise until an effective vaccine is found and distributed globally.
“When the outbreak began, I did not imagine that the death toll could be so high,” Wuhan resident Guo Jing told AFP.
“It has exceeded the expectations of many people and continues to increase.”
But in the city whose name is now synonymous with the virus, time has seen attention diverted.
“Wuhan has rebooted,” An An, a media worker, told AFP.
“Life has returned to the kind of taste we had before. Everyone who lives in Wuhan feels comfortable.”
burs-apj / rox / fox
