“What traces of COVID-19 are left in Wuhan?”
“When I was a volunteer during the pandemic, this was a new car with only 50 kilometers on the odometer. Now it has traveled 400,000 kilometers! It will be scrapped in a couple of years,” Pan Xin said as he turned his steering wheel into a street of Wuhan on a day in February 2025.
Pan still finds it hard to believe that it has been five years since Wuhan entered lockdown, on Jan. 23, 2020.
People were anxious, and he had only been working as a ride-hailing driver for two weeks, having just left a foreign company that closed down.
Back then, he was just 30, full of enthusiasm for work and a desire to do something with his life.
Cooped up at home and bored, Pan signed up without hesitation when a local leader started recruiting volunteers.
Pan joined a team of more than 300 volunteers, taking pregnant women and patients to hospital during the anxious early days of the pandemic.
“At first, I didn’t know enough to be scared, and by the time I did, it was too late to turn back,” he said.
Pan’s registered residence is in Jianghan District, but he volunteered in the East Lake High-tech Zone. Because of the lockdown ban on moving between districts, he didn’t go home for six months, sleeping in his car for the first two months before accommodation was arranged for him.
“The first two months were really tough... I ate instant noodles for two months straight,” he said.
Pan still remembers the taste of the beef-flavored soup noodles he ate every day at the community help station’s white table, pulling his mask down to his chin, but never taking off his red baseball cap with “volunteer” emblazoned on it.
At first, it was bearable, but after half a month, he couldn’t stand it any more.
“You get tired of eating the same food every day, even if it’s a delicacy,” he said. But supplies were scarce, and instant noodles and ham sausage were all they had, so he had no other choice but to put up with it.
Pan doesn’t talk about the pandemic much these days.
Asked about the mark that COVID-19 left on Wuhan, he’s at a loss.
There’s Leishenshan and Huoshenshan — temporary hospitals built for the city government by 40,000 workers in just 10 days at the start of the pandemic, and lauded as a “miracle” by state media at the time, he recalled.
“Both have closed now,” Pan said ruefully in Wuhan-inflected Mandarin. “It’s been years since the pandemic now. People have forgotten about it already.”
But not Pan. For him, some traces remain, and memories would suddenly resurface.
His BYD T3 electric van still bears a badge given to him by the government in recognition of his volunteer work. It reads: “Hero of the Pandemic”.
Pan also keeps the “special pass for the central urban area” issued by the Wuhan Municipal Public Security Traffic Management Bureau for his car, dated April 2020, and slightly faded by exposure to the sun. The Wuhan lockdown was lifted on April 8, 2020.
Pan didn’t use Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) very often. But during the pandemic, besides volunteering to transport people, he had little else to do, so he recorded some videos of himself wearing protective clothing while participating in training and posted them to his Douyin account.
They’re still there, and Pan occasionally watches them to remember that time. He also remembers that when he first became a volunteer, he didn’t know if there were any subsidies. Fortunately, after the pandemic restrictions ended, the government subsidized him 600 yuan ($83) a day.
Unlike Pan, another driver surnamed Duan, 45, never got a badge or a subsidy payment; he only volunteered for a week, delivering clothes and other items for doctors, but was too scared to continue.
While many other Chinese cities went into lockdown later, none were as terrifying as Wuhan at that time, Duan said.
He remembers an elderly neighbor’s body being left at home for 10 days because there was no ambulance available to transport it.
“The morgues were full,” Duan said, adding he doesn’t think much about the pandemic now.
“I just consider it an experience, nothing special,” he said. “But when I really think about it, there is still fear... how to put it... Well it didn’t befall me, I guess,” he said.
“I follow Douyin, Xinhua and the People’s Daily”
Xinhua Road, where the Huanan Seafood Market is located, is flanked by tall parasol trees.
The former market, which the Chinese government said was the source of the COVID-19 coronavirus, has been sealed off with pastel blue barriers, with a sign saying “The Huanan Market has been relocated to Huangpi District, Hankou North Avenue”.
There are also some slogans promoting “core socialist values” and advertisements.
The barriers are one of the few traces left in Wuhan of the outbreak of COVID-19.
“It’s just been left there, neither demolished nor in use,” said Pan.
Neither he nor Duan believe there is any substantial connection between the pandemic and the market.
The theory that the coronavirus came from “eating bats at the Huanan Seafood Market is nonsense,” said Duan.
Pan said people in Wuhan don’t really eat wild game, so how could the virus have jumped from bats to humans?
“This is just the government trying to calm people’s fears,” he said.
To this day, theories about the origin of COVID-19 are inconclusive.
The government shut down the market in January 2020, relocating some stalls to the suburbs.
There are still some optical shops and convenience stores in the market area but not a single restaurant within 400-500 meters.
An older man walked by the market on a day in February, not long after the Lunar New Year. Holding a child’s hand, he said the market is closed for renovations and will reopen in March.
The man who lives in the neighborhood said he wasn’t infected when the outbreak started, but contracted the Omicron variant in 2022, recovering in “two or three days.”
He doesn’t think the virus is originated in the market, either.
In March 2020, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian suggested on Twitter that American soldiers had brought the virus to China when they came to take part in the World Military Games.
The older gentleman, like the seven or eight Wuhan residents I spoke with, shares that view.
People here are clearly influenced by government propaganda, including Duan.
“Have you heard of the term ‘information cocoon’? If you watch food or travel content, you mainly get food or travel content in your feed,” he said, adding: “I like to watch military and political content.”
He admitted that there are media controls in China, but said there are plenty of other channels online to get information these days.
“I follow Douyin, Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily,” Duan said.
“Whistleblower Coffee” and “Oh, that deceased doctor”
Wuhan, at the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers, is the largest city in central China and a transportation hub connecting nine provinces, as well as a major regional junction on railway, highway, and aviation routes.
Most people will never forget Jan. 23, 2020, the day lockdown was announced.
Steel industry worker Yu, who was working in Guangdong province at the time, was on his way back to Wuhan for the Lunar New Year when he was stopped at an intersection and had to choose between turning back and being unable to leave until the lockdown was lifted.
He chose to continue his journey.
“Of course I had to go home for the Lunar New Year,” he said to me in February, recalling what happened five years ago.
Wuhan’s lockdown would go on for 76 days, a number still bears special significance in the city today. During the 76 days, Wuhan residents were confined to their homes, almost completely losing their freedom.
Yet, while many endured those difficult days, the city has no monument or exhibit commemorating their sufferings.
But some places still remind people how the pandemic swept through the city.
Jinyintan Hospital is one of such landmarks. Known for specializing in infectious diseases, the hospital was the first to take patients once the outbreak started.
In April 2024, it announced that it would officially separate its infectious diseases unit from general medical services, a step to transition to a general hospital.
Its health clinic is nestled in a residential community on Jianghan North Road, and the clinic seems tranquil, with none of the frenzied activity it once saw.
Around noon, a long line formed at a braised meat pancake shop across the hospital.
Tongji Hospital was also one of the first to treat a large number of patients, particularly the critically ill.
Jiefang Avenue in Qiaokou District, a major north-south thoroughfare where the hospital’s main campus is located, is now bustling with traffic. The bright red signage of the emergency department on the first floor beside the main entrance, shines out in the dusk.
Another driver surnamed Qian said that the only public memorial he knows is on the overpass near Tongji Hospital. It honors medical personnel from various provinces who rushed to Wuhan to help when the pandemic broke out.
But instead of the names of these people as Qian remembered, the railing displays various numbers. One entry reads: “Tibetan Medical Team: 3 people.”
Wuhan Central Hospital, where Dr. Li Wenliang worked, had some of the highest rates of infection among medical staff.
Located on Nanjing Road, across from the historical and cultural street Xian’an Fang, with red brick walls and a lane layout, the hospital is surrounded by chain restaurants and quirky boutique shops.
Memories of the pandemic occasionally resurface here, too.
Near the hospital, there is a bar that offers coffee and old movies. It has been open for a year, but the owner said it has been “open for quite a long time.”
There is also a café that also sells vintage jewelry and designer clothing, which opened last October.
“Cafés come and go so fast here,” said a clerk surnamed Yang.
In 2021, media reports emerged that one café nearby had a menu item called “Whistleblower Coffee — 100% Controversial”. The café is no longer there.
In a bar with progressive decor, there is a range of feminist-themed exhibits, where customers leave books and recommendations. There are a lot of comments about death on the bookshelf, but there is no mention of Li Wenliang. It’s as if there’s a tacit agreement not to mention him.
Li, who worked as an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, later became known as the whistleblower of the COVID-19 pandemic for being the first to warn people about the virus in a group chat.
He was reprimanded by the authorities and labeled as a “rumormonger.” On Feb. 7, 2020, Wuhan Central Hospital announced the death of the 34-year-old Dr. Li, sending shockwaves through social media.
In the F exit of the Xunlimen subway station, about an eight-minute bike ride from the hospital where Dr. Li worked, is a large shopping mall, similar to those found in other Chinese cities, complete with bubble tea shops, trending restaurants and beauty salons.
“Who is Li Wenliang?” asked the owner of a small shop inside the mall that sells phone screen protectors, wiping a phone with an alcohol swab. “I don’t know him.”
It turns out he’s not from Wuhan and only came to work here from Hunan three years ago. Most locals in Wuhan would have heard of Dr. Li, and when his name is mentioned, some say, “Oh, that deceased doctor.”
At the hospital where Dr. Li worked, his name is no longer on the wall of specialists, and the staff at the service desk responded cautiously to questions about him.
“He used to work here, but we didn’t know him well,” one said.
The owner of the newsstand at the hospital entrance said: “He’s dead; the pandemic is over. I don’t really know. You can look it up online.”
Online, China’s homegrown AI DeepSeek, which is said to rival chatGPT and be a source of national pride, cannot answer the question “Who is Li Wenliang?”
It replies: “Hello, I can’t answer that question right now. Let’s change the topic and chat about something else.”
But Li has not been forgotten everywhere. On Sina Weibo, his last public post remains forever dated Feb. 1, 2020: “Today, my nucleic acid test result is positive; the dust has settled, and I have finally been diagnosed.”
People have left more than a million comments under the post, and continue to post there.
Some “chatted” with him: “We broke up around the Lantern Festival and Valentine’s Day,” reads one. “I know it was the right thing to do, but who would be happy about it, right? I’m going to take my driver’s license test and hope I can pass it.”
Another more nostalgic comment reads “Hey Dr. Li, the flowers are about to bloom in Beijing.”
Wuhan may have no memorial for Li, but countless Chinese people are remembering him.
Disappearing shops and booming tourism
How did the pandemic leave Wuhan?
For Qian, the biggest impact on Wuhan has been the economic downturn.
“Shops are closing one after another; entire streets are closing,” he said, adding that while the economy has been poor across China in recent years, the effects on Wuhan have been more obvious.
Qian ran a children’s photography studio for about 10 years, but business plummeted during the pandemic and he had to shut it down.
He stayed at home for a while and then became a ride-hailing driver. But since the pandemic, his income has fallen significantly.
Office workers in Wuhan can expect to make 4,000-5,000 yuan (US$551-689) per month, but the cost of living in the city is high.
Jiang Ting, who works in mall leasing, also feels that the pandemic has had a severe economic impact on the city.
When the lockdown was first lifted, people engaged in a bout of post-pandemic revenge spending, but soon people found that they had to scale down their spending, she said.
The restaurant industry was less affected, but there has been a decline in the number of clothing brands. She hears a lot of mall tenants complain of falling revenue.
Her parents, who moved to Wuhan years ago for the clothing business, have also closed their shop and returned to their hometown in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, during the epidemic.
People are also sharing online how their lives have been impacted by the pandemic.
A Weibo user who once wrote “Wuhan Diary” asked: “What do you want to say about the fifth year of the pandemic?”
Another user commented that she now only makes a quarter of her pre-pandemic income, and her living standards have plummeted. But like many Wuhan residents, she remains positive: “I am grateful to have survived the pandemic, and we have to keep striving for tomorrow.”
Wuhan’s tourism industry has seen an unexpected boom despite the economic downturn.
A report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2020 on the trends in tourism demand during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that Wuhan became the most popular city destination, toppling Beijing from the top spot.
The local government has shifted resources to vigorously develop the tourism industry after the pandemic.
In 2025, an article from Changjiang Online mentioned plans to make Huangpi District in Wuhan a “pilot area” for building a world-class tourist destination.
Yu, who moved back to Wuhan from Guangdong after the pandemic to help with his child’s education, remembers “astonishing” crowds at the Yangtze River Bridge and the Yellow Crane Tower during the first week-long National Day break after lockdown ended.
“I was shocked,” Yu said, recalling tourists flocked to the city during the Lunar New Year Festival two years ago, a year of heavy snowfall when crowds of people set off fireworks along the Yangtze River embankment.
“It feels like Wuhan has gotten famous,” he said.
“Don’t mention the pandemic”
Despite the official narrative that Wuhan is a “heroic city” and its bounce-back as a tourist destination, many in Wuhan still carry the scars of lockdown, five years on.
They rarely mention the pandemic voluntarily and consciously avoid bringing up traumatic memories.
“It feels like having PTSD, with a sense of extreme insecurity about life,” one interviewee said, adding that people have also “lost enthusiasm for participating in public affairs, becoming more averse to grand narratives that are far removed from daily life.”
The authorities don’t like talking about the pandemic, either.
Zhong Yang, who was preparing for the civil service exam in Guangdong, was instructed before his interview to avoid using the word “pandemic” in his responses. He was warned that doing so would cost him points and was instead advised to refer to it as “those years.”
And when Wuhan was one of the hosting venues during the 2024 Lunar New Year Festival Gala, the host never once connected this major central Chinese city to the pandemic.
Yet some choose not to forget.
Hu Qichan, who lived through the lockdown, told me in an interview two days before lockdown was lifted in 2020 that people were already quick to forget.
With the lifting of the lockdown came a sense that “there was no accountability, as if everything was now fine,” Hu said, adding that the tragedies of those two months weighed heavily on her mind.
“I will never forget that feeling,” she said.
Five years later, Hu’s memories of the pandemic are still vivid: the hasty lockdown, the strained medical resources, the stalled transportation, the patients who couldn’t get treatment, and the friends who had disagreements over the idea of “sacrificing the city to save the nation.”
She is still livid at having been confined at home for two months, and does not agree with sacrificing the individual for the collective.
Hu went straight to Hong Kong once the lockdown ended, as the pandemic directly influenced the choices she has made for her life.
She had thought about working in Beijing, but as a journalist who experienced the pandemic firsthand, she sensed an extreme lack of freedom of the press in mainland China.
“I couldn’t change anything,” she said. “All I could do was escape.”
Hu has only been back to Wuhan four times since, mainly to visit family, and has stayed only a few days each time.
She has noticed some changes in the city, like the new East Lake Greenway and the growing number of tech companies in Wuhan’s Optics Valley.
But she feels little attachment to the city. “Wuhan is progressing, but no matter how much it progresses, I won’t stay there,” Hu said.
For many Wuhan residents who have never thought of leaving, life goes on as usual; they have just gotten used to wearing masks.
“Wuhan people take this seriously,” said 25-year-old Wuhan resident surnamed Yang, adding: “They have been hurt before.”
Yang has lived in Wuhan her whole life. She still feels a sense of surreality when looking back at the pandemic.
She initially didn’t expect the lockdown, and later saw people gathering and protesting their confinement in the streets; she hated staying at home, so at the beginning of the lockdown, she didn’t know what to do with herself at home.
Her home was across from Wuhan No. 6 Hospital, and every day she would watch the traffic from her balcony, listening to the ambulance sirens and feeling extremely anxious. She relieved her stress by binge-watching “Empresses in the Palace.”
Out of the three years of zero-COVID restrictions, the image that left the deepest scar on Yang was watching her girlfriend being taken away by a community vehicle late at night. It was 2022, and she had gotten home to her apartment in Huangpi District after a day out with her girlfriend Fu.
Suddenly, the phone rang, and they hesitated for a long time about whether to answer it or to open the door. Eventually, they opened the door, and staff in hazmat suits took Fu, who had been on the same journey as her, onto a bus, claiming she was a “close contact” of a COVID-19 patient.
The bus was packed with people wearing masks. After Fu got on the bus, it continued to pick up people from different places, arriving at a suburban hotel around one or two in the morning. The hotel’s elevator and hallway were all covered in plastic wrap, and the facilities were quite old.
“The toilets were yellow,” Fu said.
That night Fu was very frightened, and stayed up all night video calling with Yang.
Fortunately, she was only quarantined for one day. The next day, more and more people in the community said they had tested positive for COVID-19. Soon, everyone was getting infected with the virus, and they no longer cared.
Fu has since developed a traumatic stress response for a period of time. She was afraid to answer calls, fearing that she would be taken away again as soon as the call ended. She jumped whenever her school counselor called, dreading that she might be required to check in for vital signs monitoring before 8 a.m.
Girl with a camera: “I don’t want to forget”
The pandemic seems to have had some positive effects on people, though.
Before lockdown, Yang was working as a clerk at a company, a job her parents arranged for her, but after it ended, she was keen to get on with what she really wanted to do. After all, what if she died and had never done it?
She had always wanted to be a photographer, so the day after the lockdown, she went to a nearby camera shop and bought a Canon 90D.
She carried this camera around the city, capturing scenes and moments with the click of her shutter.
“I want to make a record, to not forget,” she said.
In 2022, she saw a middle-aged woman staring into the distance on a bridge. The pandemic had “made people anxious,” and Yang sensed that she was imagining what the future would be like, so she pressed the shutter.
During the pandemic, the government sealed off many areas with metal barriers, but people had punched holes in some of them to pass supplies and deliveries to those behind them.
As the pandemic ended, Yang saw people gradually returning to their lives through these holes in the barrier, and captured another middle-aged woman riding a bicycle, and a delivery worker hustling for a living.
It’s not that people have forgotten the pandemic, Yang said. If they do talk about it, everyone still has a lot to say.
“Wuhan people would say, ‘What were you doing during that time? What I was doing’ and then they would really feel like, ‘We were awesome! We are all survivors,’” she said.
Yang experienced the loss of a grandfather, who died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that worsened during the pandemic. In the days leading up to her grandfather’s death, they ordered a large bucket of KFC and ate it together.
If she could go back to that time, Yang would want to tell the grandfather, who raised her, that she loves him very much.
“When I think of the past, I always want to do better, wondering if I could have done better,” she said.
That loss made Yang reflect on life and death for the first time.
“The dead are dead; those who are alive must live. There’s nothing you can do about it other than to love your life,” she said.
Pan agreed.
For Fu, the pandemic has made her cherish her relationship with Yang more, and that they forged a stronger bond through that testing time.
They both got sick and cared for each other, calming each other’s fears. When Fu was quarantined, Yang stayed on the phone with her all night; when Yang delivered food, Fu went with her.
Yang, who had worked at a French restaurant that closed during lockdown, started delivering food to supplement her income.
One night, after eleven, they received an order for a delivery of fried chicken. When they arrived at the fried chicken shop, they found that the doors were all sealed off.
The chef handed the food to them over the door. They took the fried chicken and bid farewell to an older man who had been chatting with them while they waited, hopped onto their electric bike, and headed to the locked-down community to deliver the food.
The smell of fried chicken and the warmth of companionship will stay with them forever, Fu said, smiling.
“I think being in love diluted the impact of the pandemic,” she said.
Milan Kundera once told a story about a thirty-year-old man named Jonas who wanders in an empty world. In the months leading up to his suicide, he desperately searches for traces of his life and the memories of others.
That process is still going on unconsciously in post-pandemic Wuhan with all of its hardships, as people hold onto their memories, soothe their pain and resist forgetting.
(The name “Pan Xin” used for the driver in the article is a pseudonym to protect his privacy)
To read the original story in Chinese, click here.
