People In Wuhan Are Now Partying After The Chinese City Has Had No New Cases Since May
A glimpse at life as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
By Sadho Ram — 26 Sep 2020, 12:20 AM — Updated about 4 years ago
In Wuhan, where no locally transmitted cases of the coronavirus have been reported since mid-May, life appears to be how it could have been in 2019 — before the COVID-19 pandemic — with people partying at nightclubs, packed music festivals, and hardly any masks in sight
People dancing inside a disco bar in Wuhan on 18 September 2020.
Image via Metro UK via Getty Images
A scene at a giant pool party showing thousands of people in Wuhan in August 2020.
Image via The Australian via AFP
A performer on a water jet board entertaining his audience by hovering above them in Wuhan in August 2020.
Image via Daily Mail via AFPIn photos taken on Friday, 18 September, clubgoers are seen frolicking at a disco in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which was the epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak in China about eight months ago
Back then, the world was still identifying COVID-19 with the name of the city as the Wuhan virus.
In August, thousands of residents flocked to the Wuhan Maya Beach Water Park, where pandemic practises such as social distancing and face masks — the new normal around the world — had no place
It's important to note here that the people of Wuhan were the first in the world to experience COVID-19 when it was still an unknown virus
In January, the city placed under a complete lockdown for nearly three months, the world's first COVID-19 lockdown that made Wuhan appear like a ghost town devoid of residents and vehicles.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the Wuhan lockdown was "unprecedented in public health history" as affected a total of about 57 million people in the Hubei Province.
The below drone footage uploaded on 28 January provides a bird's-eye view of the vacant city.
"It's easy to look at the pictures of the pool party and pass it off as Chinese people being socially irresponsible," a business executive, Gan Zhixiu, was quoted as saying by VICE News last month.
"But do not forget how it must have felt like for all of us actually living in Wuhan who were the first people in the world to experience such unsettling beginnings of an unknown and dangerous virus that was emerging and then being forced under state lockdown in our homes. The rest of the world didn't believe us that an epidemic was unfolding," Gan said of the lockdown that she and her family endured.
Meanwhile, Valerie Chan, a 23-year-old university graduate who was born and raised in Wuhan, said that while people were "scared at the beginning and the city became associated with the coronavirus", the view that she and her friends now have is that "life has largely returned to normal".
"There isn't a sense of widespread panic or a lingering shadow from the virus hanging over us anymore — but it isn't because we are letting our guards down. There just haven't been reports of new coronavirus cases in Wuhan for a long time," VICE News quoted her as saying.
