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If you haven't bookmarked the news site Sixth Tone, you're missing some astounding COVID-19 coverage. Example: How Wenzhou, 900 km From Wuhan, Went Into Total Lockdown. Click or tap through for the full story and some vivid photos. Excerpt:
Lüzhang Village usually comes to life around the Lunar New Year holiday, with neighbors setting off firecrackers and gathering for mahjong games and boozy feasts. But for the past three weeks, Lüzhang’s 100 or so families have kept their doors firmly shut. Only the occasional rooster crow breaks the silence.
The village, which sits on the edge of the eastern city of Wenzhou, is under a full lockdown as authorities take drastic measures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus that has killed over 1,300 people in China as of Feb. 14. Residents are only allowed to leave their homes once every two days to buy groceries — and must present a specially issued pass to do so.
The atmosphere among locals is tense, and their anxieties are focused on one house in particular: a four-story structure with a shiny SUV parked outside. The car’s license plate indicates it was registered in Wuhan, the city where the novel coronavirus emerged in December.
The SUV’s owner is Xia Xiaochai, a 38-year-old Lüzhang native who has spent the past decade running a business in central China. His annual trips back to his hometown are normally filled with joyful reunions, but since Jan. 23, he and his family haven’t left the house once.
“I know they (the villagers) are all afraid of me,” Xia tells Sixth Tone.
Xia is part of an enormous tribe of traveling Wenzhou entrepreneurs who have unwittingly brought their hometown to a standstill, with the coastal city facing one of the most serious COVID-19 outbreaks outside Hubei province — the center of the epidemic.
Wenzhou is famous across China for its savvy businesspeople, who have moved across the world in vast numbers in search of new moneymaking opportunities. There are an estimated 1.6 million people from Wenzhou running businesses in other parts of China, and another 600,000 overseas.
And one of the largest magnets for the city’s diaspora has been Wuhan. Migrants from Wenzhou set up a chamber of commerce in Wuhan in 1997, and within a decade there were an estimated 170,000 Wenzhou businesspeople working in the city. Xia made the move in 2009, setting up a beauty parlor in downtown Wuhan.
“The street is full of beauty salons that are all run by Wenzhou businesspeople,” says Xia. “We also dominate the local shoe, garment, infrastructure construction, and hardware industries.”
The thriving community, however, became a liability for their hometown after COVID-19 began to spread rapidly through Wuhan. As the situation deteriorated through January, thousands returned to Wenzhou to celebrate the Lunar New Year — or simply to escape the epidemic. The virus came with them.
By Jan. 29, there were 172 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Wenzhou, the highest figure for any city outside Hubei province. Of the 58 people diagnosed with the disease that day, 60% were people who had recently returned from Wuhan.
“We’ve found that the incidence of virus infections has risen in direct proportion to the number of returning Wenzhou people,” Tang Xiaoshu, Wenzhou’s deputy mayor, told reporters at a Jan. 29 press conference.
The risks weren’t difficult to foresee given the size of Wenzhou’s diaspora. Wenzhou authorities started taking action to contain the risks of an outbreak Jan. 20 — the day Zhong Nanshan, the virus expert famous for his work during the 2003 SARS epidemic, revealed that COVID-19 was capable of human-to-human transmission.
Four days before the start of the Lunar New Year holiday, officials contacted the Wenzhou chamber of commerce in Wuhan, telling them to stop Wenzhou businesspeople from returning to their hometown.
“We did issue a notice on Jan. 20, encouraging Wenzhou people not to return home for the upcoming holiday,” Yang Buqing, secretary-general of the Wenzhou chamber of commerce in Hubei province, tells Sixth Tone.
The message, however, appeared to have almost no impact. By Jan. 29, 33,000 people had returned to Wenzhou from Wuhan and its neighboring cities. The flood of returnees continued even after Wuhan imposed a lockdown Jan. 23, cutting off almost all air, road, and rail transportation, with 3,600 people arriving from Wuhan each day on average. According to Yang, most — if not all — the Wenzhou people she knows have left Wuhan.
Xia got out the same day the chamber of commerce issued its notice. He, his wife, two children, and over a dozen relatives drove the 900 kilometers back to Lüzhang in a convoy of four cars.
At that point, Wuhan didn’t feel like a city in the grip of a public health crisis, according to Xia. He was mainly concerned with getting home ahead of the holiday.
“The atmosphere in Wuhan was just like usual — nobody was wearing a mask,” says Xia, who is also deputy chairman of the Wenzhou chamber of commerce in Wuhan. “My thoughts back then were that my elderly mother was waiting for me at home, and I hadn’t seen her for a whole year. I had to go.”
After arriving home, Xia’s family started their traditional Lunar New Year routine: hosting big family gatherings. They ate and had fun together for two days.
The next day, however, Xia heard about the lockdown in Wuhan. He realized that the issue might be more serious than he’d imagined. The same day, his brother-in-law — who had also just returned from Wuhan — tested positive for COVID-19 after going to the hospital, saying he felt unwell.
“I was paying attention to the issue and wasn’t really worried (until then),” says Xia. “But I really freaked out after my brother-in-law was diagnosed. I started to receive numerous calls from disease control staff from the village, township, county, and city-level departments.”
Lüzhang immediately banned all cars with Wuhan license plates from entering the village, and refused entry to almost all outsiders — a practice enforced in many rural areas across China. Xia and around 20 family members, who had attended a dinner with the confirmed patient, were ordered to stay indoors for a two-week observation period — later extended to three weeks.
Village officials came to disinfect Xia’s car and his entire house. They told Xia to call an emergency number if any family members felt any form of discomfort. The local party secretary has been delivering food to Xia’s home each day, to ensure the family doesn’t go outside under any circumstances.
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