Covid-19: Wuhan Reopens but Risk is High

On December 31 2019, the Chinese office of the World Health Organization (WHO) heard the first news of a previously unknown virus causing multiple cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, a city in eastern China with a population of over 11 million.

What started as an outbreak mostly limited to China has now become a real global pandemic. According to John Hopkins University Covid-19 database, which collects information from national and international health agencies, there have now been over 787,010 recorded cases and 37,829 deaths. More than 200 countries worldwide have recorded the disease, with Italy, the US and Spain facing the most severe outbreaks outside of China. There have been 25,150 confirmed cases in the UK and 1,789 deaths as of March 31.

The Chinese government reacted to the initial outbreak by putting Wuhan and neighbouring cities in the province of Hubei under a de-facto quarantine that included about 50 million people.

The US is now the latest epicentre of the Covid-19 outbreak, becoming the first country to exceed total reported cases in China. The nation now has 164,610 confirmed infections and 3,170 deaths as of March 31. In Italy, which is facing the second-largest outbreak outside of China, the government has taken the drastic step of extending a lockout to the nation as a whole, closing down theatres, movie theatres, gyms, discotheques and pubs and banning funeral services and weddings. In the United Kingdom, the government has shut down schools, bars, restaurants, cafés and other non-essential stores.

Wuhan was where the coronavirus originated from, and consequently, Wuhan is the very first place we see it ending. But are we? Wuhan is "reopening," but the Chinese version of reopening is more stringent than our version of total lockdown:

People are only allowed out of their residential buildings if they have a return-to-work pass issued by their workplace, and only if their mobile phone's government-approved health code lights up green — not orange or red — to prove they are safe and clean for travel.

Residents say that, without warning, some sites considered infection-free have suddenly lost that status.

Citizens must stand five feet apart on escalators in the malls that opened this week, and disinfectant must be sprayed on the garments that customers have taken on. Passengers on the subway must wear masks and sit two seats away from each other; video on state media showed vehicles and stations practically empty.

But even with all of these restrictions still in place, it did not work. Chinese authorities are finding that allowing people — even those without fever who wear surgical masks and doused in hand sanitiser — to get too close to one another risks a new spike in infections.

Recent media reports have concentrated on "silent carriers," and studies have shown that as many as one-third of coronavirus-infected people have reduced or no symptoms. "The risk of a new round of infections appears to be relatively high," Mi Feng, spokesperson for the National Health Commission, said Sunday.

That is not good news.

Wuhan isn't showing a "steady decline" in new infection cases. They didn't "pass the peak." They went to zero and remained there for almost two weeks:

Despite that, and even with fairly stringent social distancing measures staying in force, they are still shutting down cinema theatres and karaoke bars. They have extended their ban on foreigners entering China.

The next few weeks will be critical for the rest of us.

The key to understanding the spread of COVID-19 is understanding how well various countermeasures work. Wuhan is our first field test of this. If it fails even with countermeasures still in effect nearly a month after the number of new cases had dropped to less than 2 per cent of their peak—and a week later new cases had failed to zero—we might have a very long wait ahead of us.

We're about two months behind Wuhan.

If we track their path, we'll be in lockdown at least until the end of May. Perhaps longer, considering our countermeasures will never be as draconian as theirs. End of June/July?

One thing is for sure: there is no quick fix to this.