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WUHAN, China: In late 2019, Wuhan businesswoman Duan Ling and her surgeon husband Fang Yushun began hearing snippets on hospital chat groups about an illness emerging in the city’s respiratory wards.
Duan didn’t pay much attention at first.
Fang had returned that year from a stint studying in the United States, and the couple, both 36, were planning a family, starting an expensive round of fertility treatments.
“But as more and more news got out, we started to realize that this was something different than previous infectious diseases,” Duan said.
In just over a month, Fang would become one of the first people in the world to contract what became known as COVID-19, which has since infected more than 74 million worldwide and killed more than 1.5 million.
During the first days of the outbreak, city hospitals were overflowing with patients, tests were scarce, and many doctors were working without protection.
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“At that time, there were a lot of undiagnosed patients that were already turning up in Wuhan. So we still don’t know how he got infected,” Duan said.
Fang likely contracted the disease at the hospital where he works, but the couple also lived a short distance from Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where several initial cases were linked, leading to the discovery of the disease.
On the day his case was confirmed, February 3, just over 420 people had died from COVID-19 and Wuhan had started announcing several thousand new cases a day.
Wuhan had also been two weeks into what turned out to be a grueling 76-day lockdown that cut off the city from the rest of China.
“I finally felt that the numbers are not just cold facts, because among those 2,388 people, one of them is the protector of my little family,” Duan said.
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Survivors
Fang was lucky. While 3,869 people would eventually die of coronavirus in Wuhan, he only suffered a moderate case and still had to go to work even after he started showing symptoms, Duan recalls.
Duan also believes it is possible he contracted the virus, as he showed some symptoms around the same time, but testing in Wuhan was sparse in the first months of 2020 and limited to some front-line workers and seriously ill patients.
When Fang was admitted to the hospital, he had a high fever, his resting heart rate was over 100 beats per minute, and his chest X-rays looked like frosted glass. Duan characterized the time as surreal.
“When I was alone, I would watch the video of him playing guitar in the bedroom during his studies abroad” in 2019, she said, a lump in her throat recounting the difficult two months they spent apart during her illness and recovery.
“But this epidemic had never once let me cry, and I always believed that we would get over it,” he said.
Video clips shared by the couple show a masked Fang moving slowly through their neighborhood in blue and white pajamas.
While Fang was one of the first confirmed patients in the world, his COVID-19 survivor status now places him in a club of more than 70 million people around the world, many of whom continue to face complex health problems. .
About nine out of ten COVID-19 survivors experience long-lasting side effects, and the long-term impacts of the disease are unknown.
Duan says that family and friends are still afraid that Fang’s illness will flare up.
“They can also raise this concern when we go to the party with them, so we will not go. So there will still be some uncomfortable things in my heart.”
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RETURN TO NORMALITY
Today, Wuhan has largely returned to normal. The city has not reported a new COVID-19 case since May. Its streets, bars, wet markets and restaurants are packed.
But for some families less fortunate than Fang and Duan, the memories of the traumatic early days remain hard to forget.
“I have nothing left to say,” said a Wuhan woman surnamed Chen, who contracted the disease along with her mother, father and sister in January. His father died in early February.
“Although Wuhan is back to normal, you cannot turn off the news … you cannot escape these memories when everyone is experiencing them,” said Chen, who declined to use her full name because she was warned. against sharing your story with local police at the beginning of the pandemic.
For Duan and Fang, they are focused on the future.
The couple will move into a new apartment, which a local real estate developer offered at a 15 percent discount to front-line medical workers.
Surrounded by unopened cardboard boxes, they discuss plans to restart fertility treatments.
“Life is actually quite short and life is also a process with many surprises,” Duan said. “Every day of peace and quiet is truly precious. Therefore, we will appreciate our time together more in the future.”
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