Front Burner - A return to Wuhan

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Last January, Wuhan became the epicentre of the coronavirus. The Chinese city went under a strict lockdown for almost two months. The conditions were so severe that buildings were sealed off, and barricades erected. Today, the economy is booming again, but many people are still reeling from the trauma brought by the virus and the way it was managed. CBC Asia correspondent Saša Petricic travelled to Wuhan to better understand what life is like there now. He tells host Jayme Poisson about what he heard.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. On December 31st, 2019, almost a year ago now, if you can believe it, a cluster of pneumonia cases were reported to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.

The symptoms were mainly fever, with a few patients finding it hard to breathe. We didn't have a name for it yet, but what those people in Wuhan had was a novel coronavirus, COVID-19. China has faced a lot of criticism for how it responded to the virus. It took nearly a month before Wuhan went into lockdown, and since then COVID-19 has killed nearly 1.4 million people around the world. In Wuhan, the virus has left an indelible mark. Not only was it the epicenter of the disease's development, but in many ways the city was also the epicenter of China's outbreak response. Today, we return to Wuhan with CBC Asia correspondent Sasha Petrusik. This is Front Brown.

Hi, Sasha. Thanks so much for joining me today. Hi, Jamie. My pleasure. So we're speaking to you from Beijing right now, but I know that you just spent some time reporting in Wuhan. And can you describe what is the city's downtown like these days? What does it look like? It is a very, very pleasant place. Going there after having spent some time in Canada and other places, it is shocking how normal Wuhan is right now, how normal it seems. how normal Wuhan is right now, how normal it seems.

People get on buses and subways every morning. They go to work. They hang out in restaurants and bars. They fill these places. There's regular entertainment. Some people wear masks, and virtually no one does any sort of distancing. And it doesn't seem as though anyone is actually suggesting that you should. Sure, there are more bottles of hand sanitizer out, but that's pretty much it. And, you know, this is such a huge contrast to what I remember when I was in China as all of this was breaking out. At the end of

January, up until that point, China had been kind of trying to keep all of this very, very quiet. But at the end of January, everything just broke loose. Those infected are in China, Thailand and Japan, but all have a connection to the Chinese city of Wuhan. A new study out of the UK suggests the numbers could be vastly underestimated. And China declared a very, very strict lockdown in Wuhan and it was going to go into effect in a matter of hours. The railway station was closed, everything was closed. The railway station was closed. Everything was closed.

Patients in isolation units being treated by doctors in biohazard suits. Pharmacies struggling to keep masks on the shelves. I'm really worried. I'm really scared it'll become the next SARS. All of a sudden, this place was under some kind of martial law. It was extremely grim in that place at that time. People were stuck inside. They were literally locked inside in some cases with the doors welded shut, sealed shut. People who were suspected of being sick were dragged away to some kind of medical facilities. of being sick were dragged away to some kind of medical facilities.

With multiple unverified videos showing the quarantine squads at work. I don't want to be taken away like that. A child can be hurt. And there were shortages of food, There were shortages of medical supplies and medical treatment. So it was such a huge contrast to go back there now and to see this place, which was, as I say, extremely pleasant and extremely normal. Right, right. And you mentioned that lockdown in January, even far more strict than what we're seeing here. You know, the idea that people were literally welded inside their homes.

I have to say, when I saw images that you recently got from Wuhan, I was taken aback. I had like a physical reaction to the images that you got of people just in bars drinking with their friends. that you got of people just in bars drinking with their friends. I definitely did not expect to see that. It was very, very surprising, even in China, where things are quite lax. And I've been in Beijing for a while now, and this city is pretty much functioning normally. But you do get stopped every once in a while to have your temperature taken or to show someone there's an app that you have to have on your phone, which does some sort of calculation and figures out whether you've been to places that are in danger, and it gives you a green or a yellow or a red sticker.

and it gives you a green or a yellow or a red sticker. That happens in Beijing. Nobody really stopped me in Wuhan to ask me for that sort of thing. I know that you went to the seafood market that's suspected to be where the virus originated or at least spread widely. And what does it look like now? It's closed up. It is boarded up. It has a very nice wall all around it with some

paintings and some potted plants. And basically, there's no sign that it was a seafood market. You do see inside the shuttered stalls that were there. We've seen pictures of those. That looked very grim at the time. And right right now it's pretty much deserted. Obviously, this is a very, very important place, and I think people in Wuhan itself also think of it as pretty grim. Mm-hmm. You know, we talked about just how awful things were back in the winter. And there have been nearly 4,000 deaths recorded in Wuhan. And, you know, I understand that it's likely that the numbers are probably actually higher than that.

You know, you talked about bodies being collected from apartments. I remember those videos circulating through social media apps. But talk to me about what it's like today in terms of case numbers. What is the case count been like in recent months? I imagine it's quite low considering the fact that you can just kind of live a normal life there. I mean, the case count has been near or at zero. Officially, there hasn't been a single locally transmitted case infection in at least six months now. Any cases that have popped up, and there have been one or two back in the spring especially, officials say that those were brought in from the outside. At least that is the official line. But whether or not there are zero cases there, it is true that there's no sign

of any cases. There's no sections of the city that are blocked off. There's no hospitals that are blocked off. There's no clue that something bad is going on. There are a lot of people, medical people especially, who see that very strict, that very grim lockdown in China way back in January in Wuhan itself. And they credit that for what we see today, the fact that there are no cases or very few cases since that lockdown. I spoke to one doctor there, Dr. Yu Changping, who was on the front lines. He is a lung specialist, and he works at the main hospital in Wuhan. And he himself was the first doctor to actually catch the disease, to catch COVID. He went on TV at the time from his hospital bed to try to put out some inspirational kind of messages to tell people it's OK, it's going to get better, we can handle this sort of thing.

But in fact, when I spoke to him, he told me that it took him three and a half months to get over it in the first instance. And that even today he has trouble breathing, that he didn't think that was going to happen. And that, in fact, it was life-threatening at the time, even though he was saying on TV that it's okay. he was saying on TV that it's okay. So this is the sort of thing that we're hearing from people who actually lived through it, who are specialists and who didn't know what hit them. Wow. I want to talk a little bit more about those lingering effects. You know, obviously the virus, as you mentioned, has had this huge effect and impact on the people there, not just the lockdown, but the virus itself.

And I know that you also interviewed a woman who had COVID and her husband had it as well. And can you tell me a bit more about their story? Yes, I think their story is really, I guess, a reminder that even though COVID may be gone from Wuhan, the effects linger, they continue. The woman that I spoke to was Xie Shuli. She is in her 60s, and she spends most of her days outside the hospital where her husband is right now. That's where I spoke to her. She told me the story that her husband, who's a musician, collapsed on January 23rd,

the same day that the lockdown was announced, with a high fever. She tried to take him to one hospital. The hospital wouldn't accept him. They went around the whole city. Eventually, there was a hospital that took him. And when they actually examined him, they rushed him straight into ICU because he was in such serious shape. Well, soon after that, she herself got the disease and she went to a different hospital. And for the next four months, they didn't see each other. They didn't know where they were and they couldn't speak to each other. They were each being shuffled from one hospital to another, more than half a dozen different hospitals around Wuhan. And that really speaks to some of the problems that

the system had in dealing with this. Not only was there a lack of space in hospitals and a lack of equipment, there was also a lack of coordination. And China was really struggling to figure out how to deal with so many people being sick and, in fact, so many people dying. In her case, she recovered eventually and found out where her husband was. He was still in ICU at that time. They've tested him, and he doesn't have the virus anymore, but we are now 10 months later, more than 10 months later. He is still in hospital.

He is drifting in and out of consciousness, she says, and he's still having trouble breathing. He's on a ventilator. So that's kind of the long-term effect. She was telling me that in fact she, you know, she just doesn't know what she's going to do. She doesn't know what the rest of her life is going to be. And it may well mean sitting next to her husband's bed until the day that he either recovers, which she doesn't think he will, or he dies. Wow. This sounds so incredibly traumatic. What does she think of the government's response to the crisis? I know that there was a lot of concern in the early days of the pandemic, that there wasn't enough transparency about what was happening, that warnings went

unheeded. Did she talk to you about that at all? She was very reluctant to criticize the government. And in fact, that is true with pretty much everybody that I spoke to. In the early days of Wuhan's experience with the pandemic, the rules were a little bit looser than they normally are in China. And in fact, there were bloggers who were going online, there were others who were speaking out and saying that the government wasn't acting quickly enough and kind of revealing these shortages and these problems with hospitals and other things. People are mourning the doctor who died yesterday after putting out an early warning about the coronavirus outbreak. The hashtag, I want freedom of speech, viewed almost two million times before being blocked. Since then, China has really clamped down on that.

Some of these bloggers have disappeared and the information is not readily available. And these days in Wuhan, the word is that if you actually criticize the government, there's a very good chance that the police will come knocking on your door within a few days and ask you some pretty tough questions. So, very few people will actually criticize directly. They will talk about how difficult it was at the time, especially economically, how they had trouble making ends meet during the lockdown itself. But then they quickly go on and say, but of course, you know, that was good medicine for us because look at us now. We can walk around the city. We can go to restaurants. We can go to bars.

Things are better. And in a way, they kind of excuse the government. In that period, we think it's not worth it. But after that, I think it's worth it. Because the coronavirus nearly disappeared in our country. So I think foreign countries can do as us. But if you talk to them privately, they do still, they've obviously been very, very affected by all of this, and they still think back to some very, very tough times, and they feel that they were betrayed at the time, but they can't really talk about that right now, or they feel that way. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my

new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. together to listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. In all the conversations that you had, are there any more themes that sort of stuck out to you? You know, I've covered a lot of stories in a lot of places, including some really major disasters. And I can't remember the last time that I went to a place and talked to people and had so many people literally burst out in crying when I spoke to them. It happened with this woman that I just described, but many others as well. Well, many, several others as well, which is a lot. And clearly, under the surface, there are scars that still remain. And people have been stressed.

People have been worried about their financial future because the help from the Chinese government has not been nearly as generous as it's been in many other countries. There isn't as much of a social safety net in this country. And that's been one of the things that was revealed by the pandemic. So people are worried about that kind of thing. They are very, very afraid of the virus, even though on a day-to-day basis, they kind of think they're maybe even immune to it now because of all these measures. But when you talk to them, they really do think that they're still living, as they put it, in the shadow of COVID still. Right. The idea that, like, this is a city that basically has gone through a trauma.

I can't help but think, hearing you talk about Wuhan itself, like this was a city that maybe most people had never heard about until this year. And now all of a sudden, the whole world knows about it. And for this reason that that, you know, it's the epicenter of this horrible virus that's now spread globally. And have you talked, did you talk to people about that, about now the international reputation that the city has and what it might feel like to live with that? Yeah, they're very aware, of course, that Wuhan now in some places and for some people

is the equivalent of talking about COVID or talking about the virus itself. That's what comes to mind, not just outside China, but inside China as well. And they're very frustrated about that. Wuhan is a city of more than 10 million people. This is not a small village. This is a large center in China. And yet now, when people who live there, who have been very proud to live in Wuhan, when they leave the city, even if they go just outside the outskirts, they say that they are discriminated against, that people don't want to talk to them, they don't want to sit near them in some cases, they don't want to sit next to them on the bus or on the plane, that they themselves are hiding where they're from in some cases, because it's just uncomfortable. And they feel that stress,

they feel that tension. And the anger starts coming out if you actually ask them about that sort of thing, especially within China, but outside China as well. And China has been very sensitive about this being called, you know, the Chinese flu or things like that. Some people, including Donald Trump, have used those terms. Why do you keep using this? Because it comes from racist. It's not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China. That's very, very offensive here in China. And in fact, they've tried to push back and say, well, we don't even know whether this virus came from Wuhan and from this seafood market.

The World Health Organization and the international community are clearly opposed to stigmatization and linking the virus to specific countries and regions. We urge the U.S. to immediately correct its mistake. But clearly that has been burned into people's consciousness all over the world and the people of Wuhan are living with it. And one last question before we go today, Sasha, you mentioned the pushback here about the origins of this virus. I know that the World Health Organization has pledged to investigate the origins of the virus and that they want to send teams to Wuhan. And what's the latest on that? Well, there was a lot of suspicion outside China, especially in the United States, that in fact China had something to hide.

Because in the early days of the investigation that the WHO started, China insisted that it was going to be the only one to look into it. insisted that it was going to be the only one to look into it. In this second phase, which is about to start, they have said that they will allow international experts to come to Wuhan to examine some of the medical data that has been collected to try to figure out whether this virus perhaps was passed on from humans or from animals or where it came from and how it spread so quickly. They're saying now that that is going to be possible and that it's going to start as soon as possible. Okay, Sasha, thank you so much. This has been really fascinating.

My pleasure. It's been an interesting journey. All right, so before we go today, some news about Ontario's pandemic response. A new scathing report from the province's Aud auditor general found a lot of issues with how the Ford government rolled out its plan. Bonnie Lissick said that there were, quote, delays and conflicts and confusion in decision making, that overall there was a lack of emergency preparedness, not enough lab capacity, and a disorganized public health system. Lissick also found that Premier Doug Ford paid a consultant $1.6 million to develop an organizational command structure for the COVID-19 response that was, quote, overly cumbersome. None of the top leadership roles in that structure were given to public health officials. She expressed concern that all of these flaws might have led to a wider spread of the virus.

of the virus. On Wednesday, Ford said that he had serious problems with the report and that, quote, this does nothing but undermine this entire health team and that, quote, he won't stand for this. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.