Coronavirus defeated: China lifts 76-day lockdown on Wuhan city

BEIJING: China has ended its lockdown of Wuhan, the original epicentre of the coronavirus crisis, as the city re-emerges from a deadly outbreak that is now raging across the globe.But even as Wuhan reopens its borders after 76 days, some restrictions within the city will remain in place, and officials warn that the threat of further infections remains far from over.

The metropolis of 11 million, where the coronavirus was first detected in December, had been sealed off from the outside world since January 23 in an unprecedented effort to contain the outbreak.

On Wednesday, healthy residents and visitors were finally allowed to leave Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, with trains and flights resumed and highway entrances reopened.

The easing of travel restrictions on Wuhan is the latest milestone in China’sfight against COVID-19. The country reported nearly zero new local infections in recent weeks, leading to similar restrictive measures being lifted for other parts of Hubei province late last month.

Luo Ping, an epidemic control official in Wuhan, was quoted as saying by interntional media that the lifting of the lockdown marks a “full restart” of the city’s economic and social activities from their previous “suspension.” But he warned the city faces an arduous task preventing imported cases and a recurrence of local infections.

“After work and production resumed, the movement of people increased and so did the risk of cross-infections from mass gatherings. Some residents have dropped their guard and don’t wear masks when they go on the streets,” he was quoted as saying.

“The reopening of Wuhan does not mean the all-clear, neither does it mean a relaxing of epidemic prevention and control measures (within the city),” he said.

Wuhan, a sprawling industrial hub on the banks of the Yangtze River, reported more than 50,000 infections and over 2,500 deaths, accounting for 77 percent of all coronavirus deaths across China, according to the National Health Commission.

As the outbreak swept the city, much of Wuhan was brought to a halt by strict epidemic control measures — some of which would later be introduced throughout the world as the virus spread to more than 200 countries and territories, infecting more than 1.4 million people worldwide.

For more than two months, public transport in Wuhan was suspended, businesses were shut and millions of residents were confined to their homes and residential communities — not even allowed to go outside for grocery shopping.

The draconian measures apparently worked. By mid-March, the number of new infections had slowed to a trickle from thousands per day at its worst in February. In a major show of confidence, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Wuhan on March 10, praising the city and its people for being heroic. Over the past two weeks, life in Wuhan has gradually gained some semblance of normality.

Residents with a government-assigned green QR code on their mobile phones — meaning they’re healthy and safe to travel — have been allowed to go back to work as long as their employers issue them a letter.

In residential communities where no new cases have been reported for 14 days, one person per household with a green QR code can leave the compounds two hours per day.