With the arrival of 2021, there was an image that was replicated in dozens of cities around the world. The second wave of coronavirus in Europe, the outbreak in Latin America and the explosion of cases in the United States forced several countries to receive the new year with empty streets and few celebrations. However, in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic originated, the reality is very different. There, where more than 11 million inhabitants served two and a half months of strict confinement, thousands of people received the new year.
Police had designed an operation to avoid crowds, but, with hundreds of young people on the streets, the measure did not work.” 2020 was a very difficult year because of the experience of the epidemic, especially for us who live an experience impossible to forget,” said one inhabitant of the city. Despite the short social distance, they all wore hubs.
In the rest of the world, millions of people expressed their astonishment at images from the Asian giant and some even ironized the situation at the zero point of the pandemic, compared to the restrictions faced by most countries. Once the celebrations were over, thousands of people followed the night in the city’s nightclubs, where tickets were already sold out. The images of an isolated Wuhan that at the beginning of the year recorded dozens of daily cases of “mysterious pneumonia” that would eventually cause 3,869 deaths in the city.
