Wuhan’s top officials told residents to “enter into a state of war and implement wartime measures to resolutely curb the spread of this epidemic.” The order, issued by a committee of the city’s leaders, added: “Homes must be segregated, neighbors must be watched.”
Starting at 10 a.m. local time on Thursday, January 23, 2020, authorities sealed off public transportation in the city of 11 million, including the metro, the airport, the train station and long-haul bus hubs. Livestreamed video showed soldiers in face masks barricading the entrances to the train station. Residents had been given less than eight hours’ notice.
By early afternoon cars could still leave, though officials had begun closing highways into the city and said they were screening people for fever and for the illegal transport of wild animals, thought to be the original source of the virus. Health authorities counted 830 people sickened within China and 25 dead.
Doubts about the numbers
The lockdown arrived two days before the official start of Lunar New Year, when hundreds of millions of people normally travel. Several countries had cases by then, in Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States, Macao and Hong Kong, and Singapore announced its first, a 66-year-old Chinese national from Wuhan. The virus had spread to virtually every other Chinese province, none of which was quarantined.
Online, people questioned whether the move came in time. Bloggers called for Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang, to resign after he admitted the city government’s early public health responses “were not sufficient.” Thursday’s People’s Daily front page said nothing about the outbreak and led with Xi Jinping’s New Year’s wishes to former senior officials.
The official count itself drew suspicion. A London Imperial College study published Wednesday estimated that at least 4,000 people in China should be infected, based on past outbreaks of similar diseases, against the 570 or so acknowledged. Gao Fu, director of China’s Bureau of Disease Prevention and Control, dismissed it. “This is a mathematical model,” he said. “Facts must be facts and theories are just theories.”
Hospitals gave one explanation for the gap. Hundreds of residents with fevers posted on social media Wednesday night that overloaded Wuhan hospitals had turned them away, and the posts were gone by the next morning. A man from Liaoning province who sought treatment on January 12 was given oral medication and sent home. Five days later he flew to Dalian, where he was diagnosed with coronavirus pneumonia. He was in critical condition.
Preparing for more
Wuhan said it would add 3,400 beds at virus-equipped hospitals, for a total of 5,400. Caixin quoted Wuhan doctors who expected as many as 6,000 infections eventually. SARS infected more than 8,000 people from 2002 to 2003. A 23-year-old patient who was treated and released described doctors transferred from elsewhere in Wuhan and from as far as Beijing, working 16 hours a day.
The World Health Organization’s Emergency Committee, after two days of meetings in Geneva, was divided and decided not to declare an international health emergency. “Make no mistake. This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency,” director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “It may yet become one.” The WHO recommended exit screenings at airports but no restrictions on trade or travel.
