Five years after entering a strict COVID-19 lockdown, residents and officials in Wuhan, China, are hoping to move past the city's infamous reputation as the origin of the pandemic.
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00:00On the outskirts of Wuhan, China, sits a relic of the COVID-19 pandemic, an emergency field
00:08hospital, once a symbol of China's fight against the deadly virus, now empty, boarded up, and
00:15forgotten.
00:16I feel like I'm moving forward, my memory is becoming more and more blurred, but I still
00:24feel like I'm starting a new life.
00:33Five years ago, Wuhan's doctors flagged a SARS-like virus spreading throughout the city,
00:39traced to a local market.
00:41Within weeks, the city's population of 20 million found themselves at the epicenter
00:46of a deadly health crisis, with a virus that spread across the world, killing at least
00:527 million people and infecting over 700 million.
00:57On January 23, 2020, the city was the first in the world to go into lockdown, sealing
01:03itself off for 76 days.
01:06The rest of China followed, in a strict zero-COVID lockdown that lasted for two years, the effects
01:13of which are not so easily forgotten.
01:17In terms of life, people are more or less anxious and anxious, I think this is a common
01:22state of many people, and it's a process of psychological change, yes, it makes you feel
01:27anxious.
01:30Five years later, and the streets of Wuhan are no longer desolate, as the city is once
01:35again bustling with life.
01:37And now, people are paying more and more attention to Wuhan, yes, and they say Wuhan is a hero
01:44city.
01:50The city's only public commemoration of the pandemic sits next to the abandoned hospital
01:55on the outskirts of the city.
01:58A series of photos dot the wall of a nearby petrol station, faded and forgotten, just
02:04like the rest of all traces of the pandemic in Wuhan, as residents and officials look
02:09ahead.
02:10Yixin Chen and Harrell Hughes for Taiwan Plus.