Coronavirus China: When did Wuhan lockdown begin and for how long?

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Ewan Somerville17 April 2020

More than a fifth of the world’s population is now on lockdown fighting coronavirus.

But the seed of this crisis is believed to have been sown in Wuhan, a city in central China, last December.

With far more questions than answers currently, UK researchers and policymakers have been watching the Chinese city closely for clues about how long our own lockdown will continue.

Wuhan springs back into life after lockdown
AP

When was the first coronavirus case reported?

Officially, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was on December 8 in Hubei province, where Wuhan is situated.

But some have speculated that China’s data - 81,000 cases in a country of 1.4 billion people - masks the full scale of infections. At the start of the outbreak, the Communist regime censured doctors who tried to raise concerns in late December.

In March, China exonerated Dr Li Wenliang who was officially reprimanded for warning about the Covid-19 outbreak. He later died of the infection.

Scientists believe that the disease could have been transmitted from animals to humans in Huanan ‘wet’ market, Wuhan, where live wildlife is traded, often illegally. The market was shut down on January 1.

An analysis of the first 41 Covid-19 patients - all in Wuhan hospitals - in medical journal The Lancet found 27 had direct exposure in the market throughout December.

However, the South China Morning Post reported, based on unpublished Chinese government data, that the country knew about at least 266 cases of the virus in 2019, with the first recorded on November 17.

The city of 11m people is where Covid-19 first emerged
AFP via Getty Images

When was Wuhan put on lockdown?

It pales in comparison to the scale of the crisis now, but Wuhan had 540 officially confirmed cases and 17 deaths when it closed to the world.

The city of 11 million people entered lockdown at 10am local time on January 23, with residents confined to their houses and transport networks shut.

Medics wear protective clothing and wheel a patient into the Wuhan Red Cross hospital in January (Getty )
Getty

The move was taken as the virus swept the country, with cases found in half of China’s 26 provinces.

Surrounding cities and provinces soon also ground to a halt. In Hubei province, 56 million people were placed under effective quarantine.

How long has Wuhan been on lockdown?

It feels like a lifetime since the world’s eyes were on Wuhan, since the virus ravaged our own country and led to Brits entering lockdown too.

Firefighters conduct disinfection on the platform at Yichang East Railway Station in Yichang, in central China's Hubei Province
AP

But only now is Wuhan beginning to emerge from its shut down. At midnight on Wednesday, after 76 days on lockdown, the city’s roadblocks finally reopened.

The restrictions have been gradually lifted over the last few weeks, with certain residents allowed to leave their homes for limited periods and train terminals and some roads moving again.

Officially, the Chinese regime maintains that the lockdown worked - significantly reducing the so-called ‘curve’ of cases.

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But experts have warned that the potential unreliability of the country’s data means it is dangerous to use it as a hard-and-fast model of how Western nations’ lockdown will pan out.

Scientists at Imperial College London, the team advising Boris Johnson’s policy on the pandemic, have based some of their modelling on Wuhan - but accept that Britain will likely follow its own trajectory.

What is certain is that our lockdown is unlikely to end on April 13 as initially envisaged, and that we’re all in unchartered territory.

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