A year after Wuhan lockdown, China turns to 'closed-off management' in COVID-19 fight - The Globe and Mail

23, 2020, authorities brought daily life to a halt in the Chinese city hit first by the pandemic.

A partial lockdown was imposed on the Chinese capital the day before.

His home in Tonghua, a Chinese county that borders North Korea, had been locked down – again.

Now, long after the first lockdown passed, local authorities have confirmed 164 cases in Tonghua in the past week.

Last year, people in Tonghua could leave home if they carried proof of residence.

23 marks the one-year anniversary of the lockdown of Wuhan, a government-mandated straitjacketing of an entire city that created global shockwaves in the early days of an epidemic outbreak that had yet to touch most of the world.

Since then, China has deployed an arsenal to confront the virus: universal cellphone-tracking apps, digital log-in systems to register people’s movements, sophisticated track-and-trace services and an immense testing capacity that can screen millions of people a day for COVID-19.

In Tonghua, city epidemic prevention authorities issued a lengthy directive cancelling all “indoor gathering activities,” prohibiting any civic gatherings and suspending operations at all places of entertainment.

In the Hebei city of Shijiazhuang, where a larger outbreak has prompted two rounds of COVID-19 tests for all residents, schools are closed and flight and rail schedules cancelled; for a while, university students were left stranded on streets, barred from their campuses and unable to return home.

With this pattern of virus transmission, our city lockdown measures can directly help single out the sources of infection,” said Lu Jiahai, a professor at the Sun-Yat-Sen University School of Public Health.

The Chinese approach to COVID-19 has differed considerably from those in Western democracies.

Critics have called the Chinese approach overly harsh, particularly after it placed much of the world’s most populous country on lockdown early last year, occasionally even enforcing stay-home orders by welding the doors of people’s houses.

In Australia, Melbourne similarly employed a harsh lockdown last year to beat back an outbreak.

Late last year, a group of experts called on Canada to take a tougher “Canadian Shield” approach, by imposing “an effective lockdown until COVID cases are low enough that testing, tracing and isolation can work effectively.”.

In China, meanwhile, vaccines are being delivered at speed, with the government pledging to inoculate 50 million people before Chinese New Year in February and local experts predicting that one billion people will be vaccinated by year’s end – enough to achieve herd immunity.

Last year, Wang Ya barely scraped together enough revenue to cover rent and other costs at her Qing Xiang Ramen restaurant in Tonghua.

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