COVID: In Wuhan where virus was first identified, there is creeping sense more suffering is coming

In the city where it all began, there is a creeping sense more suffering is coming.

Wuhan, the city now known worldwide as COVID-19‘s original epicentre, is experiencing a second surge.

It is two weeks since zero COVID restrictions were suddenly and abruptly reversed in China – exactly what that means in terms of infections and deaths is still unknown.

But three years to the week that the first patient was admitted to a Wuhan hospital with a “pneumonia of unknown origin”, people are again getting sick.

At hospitals across the city we saw ambulances lining up to drop people off and sick people queuing at fever clinics.

Many with symptoms are coming here for medicine, advice and care.

We saw one woman being connected to oxygen, and a panicked father, crying out for help, running with his child slung over his shoulder into the children’s section of the fever clinic.

But the vast majority did not seem overly worried.

In the queue we met Mr Li, who had brought his wife in as she had caught COVID and was suffering with a high fever.

He knew people who died of the disease in 2020 when it was ripping through the city – he thinks and hopes this time will be easier.

“The mentality is different now, in the beginning everyone was pretty scared,” he said.

“Wuhan was the first to have to deal with a new coronavirus outbreak, nobody had any experience.

“People have become more and more aware of COVID and have a certain psychological endurance.

“At the moment the infection rate is high, but the fatality rate is very low.”

But it’s impossible to know just how high or how low.

Most infections are not being reported here anymore, and deaths are so narrowly defined that officially there have been fewer than 20 in nearly seven months.

Indeed, authorities confirmed on Tuesday that only COVID-positive patients who die of respiratory failure or pneumonia will be counted – anyone with an underlying condition will not.

But experts have predicted there could be hundreds of thousands of deaths by the spring, a million or more in total.

And there are other signs things are getting more serious.

Authorities ‘extremely anxious’

A crematorium on the outskirts of Wuhan was busy, family after family arriving, some dressed in traditional white scarves, others carrying framed pictures of their loved ones.

And authorities were extremely anxious – they made it very hard to film, and two cars of men followed us all day.

Mr Wang runs a small shop selling funeral decorations, he spoke to us as he was listing out what he’d sold that day.

“I’m very busy. This epidemic is lighter than 2020, but it is still more serious than normal,” he said.

“[In 2020] cremations were all handled by the government because there were so many people who died at that time, we couldn’t manage it.

“Now it is not mainly due to COVID that people die, but elderly people with underlying complications that inundate systems, the virus causes underlying diseases and leads to death.”

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But we may never know how widespread those deaths are, the instinct here is to conceal.

That was evident at the wet market where many believe the very first people became infected.

It is now totally boarded off. If you didn’t know it used to be there, you would almost certainly miss it.

Most people here just want to get on with their lives, and many are relaxed in the knowledge that Omicron is less dangerous than what hit their city exactly three years ago.

But there are those who think China has had time to prepare for this moment and didn’t – the very abrupt change in direction will come with consequences.