The Huanan seafood hub in the Chinese city of Wuhan, speculated to birth the COVID-19 pandemic, is sealed behind a blue perimeter fence. A large security force has been deployed to chase away anyone who tries to linger.
“We are just doing our job,” said a guard in black who commanded a Reuters reporter to delete footage captured near the market’s main gates. He identified himself as a worker from the city government’s epidemic prevention and control team.
Foreign journalists were called upon on an official tour to report on Wuhan’s measures to re-structure its economy after a prolonged traumatic period of Covid-19. The official message: the “heroic city” is back to business, its schools and tourist sites reopened and its enterprises running at 100% capacity.
“No other place is as safe as this,” said Lin Songtian, president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a state-backed group that helped to arrange the tour.
The location of more than 80% of the country’s COVID-19 deaths, the central Chinese city on the banks of the Yangtze river has reported zero cases of local transmission since April, and most of the strict curbs imposed during a two-month lockdown have been relaxed.
But Wuhan was accused of not taking control at a faster pace in the early stages of the outbreak amid fears of disrupting the economy or displeasing China’s leadership in Beijing. Critics mention media censorship gave the virus more time to spread without getting detected.
Wuhan remains to allow light to be shed on the genesis of a pathogen that has killed nearly 900,000 people worldwide.
The city still limits entry to locations like the Huanan market, which identified to release the first cluster of infections in December. At another wholesale market in the far north of city, accessible to the public, Reuters was refrained from speaking to stallholders and traders.
“If you don’t allow people to visit these places, you give people the impression you have something to hide,” said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who studies the politics behind China’s health issues.