A steel wall with blue-painted panels rises on the sidewalks of a major avenue that five years ago divided the largest seafood and wild species market in the center of China. Inside, there is nothing left, just the echoes of a delicious past that merged with tragedy when traders, customers, and neighbors of this place were the first to fall ill from what was then a strange virus believed to have jumped from one of the many exotic creatures, both alive and dead, being sold.
Frogs, snakes, hedgehogs, porcupines, badgers, civets, raccoon dogs, wolf cubs, deer, rats, foxes, donkeys, peacocks, deer, ducks... "You could find any animal. They brought them from all over China. Some were in cages, and they would kill, skin, and chop them right there if you wanted," recounts Wu, a lady who sold offal in the market and now has a street food stall on a central commercial street.
"This place is cursed," blurts out a municipal official who prefers not to have his name published. "A developer started negotiating with the Wuhan Government, which owns the land where the market was located, to demolish everything that remains and build residential blocks. But we Chinese are very superstitious, and the company realized that no one would want to buy a house there. Now they don't know what to do with the land. The fences were put up because many foreign journalists were coming to take photos and videos, bothering the neighbors."
The Huanan Market, identified as the ground zero of Covid, occupied the lower floor of a huge complex where, on the first floor, a small maze of glasses shops remains open. "We reopened in mid-2020, but the business has never been the same despite Wuhan residents quickly forgetting what we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic, the fear we had because we didn't know how the virus was transmitted, the many deaths, and the 76 days we spent locked up," says a vendor.
Exactly five years ago, on a cold January Saturday in an empty hotel in downtown Wuhan, receptionist Gao Hi struggled with the translator to explain that a highly contagious virus was spreading in a megacity with over 11 million inhabitants. Gao was the protagonist of the beginning of a report that EL MUNDO published from Wuhan on January 23, 2020.
This newspaper was the first Spanish-language media to set foot in the Chinese city besieged by Covid. The night before, authorities had announced they were going to close all entries and exits. The word "lockdown" appeared in headlines for the first time. That put the global spotlight on Wuhan. No one understood how a city with more inhabitants than New York or London could be locked down.
On the fifth anniversary of the day the world changed due to a virus that killed over seven million people, and whose exact origin is still unknown, we return to Wuhan to understand the weight that a city carries after making history as the pandemic epicenter.
"A heavy burden? Here, we have already forgotten all about Covid. Wuhan has turned the page. It's strange to say, but the pandemic has become a taboo topic in public. It's as if people avoid talking about it. No one wants to remember all the hell we went through because it's as if it never happened."
These are words in fluent English from Gao Hi. The former hotel receptionist from that January 2020 is now the director of the Wuhan office of an international insurance company. In these five years, besides advancing in his job and English, 32-year-old Gao has married, had a daughter, and bought a house.
"There are still many people here convinced that American soldiers who came in October 2019 to participate in the Military World Games, a sort of Olympics for armies of various countries, spread the virus in Wuhan," Gao recounts, recalling one of the theories repeated by some Chinese government propaganda channels at the time. This theory competed with another suggesting the virus originated in a high-security laboratory in Wuhan, a favorite of U.S. President Donald Trump.
There is quite a buzz these days, more than usual, in downtown Wuhan. The Chinese New Year holidays are approaching (January 29), and many Wuhan residents who work in other cities have already returned home to spend the festivities with family. One of the returnees is Dr. Xi Hui, a pulmonologist now working in Shanghai, who in 2020 was in Wuhan treating the first known Covid patients. "In reality, we treated the first cases at the end of 2019, in October or November. We noticed an unusually high incidence of pneumonia and reported it to the city's health authorities for investigation. But it's clear they didn't take it seriously because severe measures weren't taken until the end of January," Dr. Xi criticizes firmly.
"The virus was already widespread in the city, the authorities knew, but downplayed the risk," protests Zhang Hai, the first Wuhan resident to dare to sue the Municipal Government in court. His father died from Covid. In his accusation, Zhang pointed out that his father's death was a result of a "deliberate concealment of the epidemic from the public" by the authorities. In the end, the lawsuit was settled with a financial agreement.
Several subsequent investigations revealed that Wuhan officials, due to a deep-rooted aversion locally to deliver bad news to the Beijing government, out of fear of purges of officials, concealed the spread of the initial outbreaks from the central infectious disease notification system. "Local authorities didn't want to tell the truth at that time," publicly stated Dr. Zhong Nanshan, head of the National Health Commission's team and a visible figure in China's fight against the coronavirus.
On December 31, the World Health Organization (WHO) directly criticized Beijing, on the fifth anniversary of the first public warning issued about a "viral pneumonia," for its lack of transparency in sharing data on the origin of Covid.
The prevailing theory among scientists all this time is that the virus originated in bats, jumped to another animal, and mutated in a way that later allowed it to spread among humans. But uncertainties remain about who the missing link in that chain of transmission is, who the patient zero was, when exactly the SARS-CoV-2 started circulating in Wuhan, or if the ground zero is actually there.
The first major focus of spread has always been located in the Huanan market, where animals susceptible to the virus were sold, such as raccoon dogs, which could have been the intermediate host before Covid passed to humans. Many of the animals came from southern China, where horseshoe bats, the likely primary source of infection, are found.
In September 2024, a study published in the journal Cell identified raccoon dogs, civets, hedgehogs, and bamboo rats as animals transmitting viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 and being sold in the market. To demonstrate that the first Covid cases began in the place now closed off by the blue steel wall, Michael Worobey, director of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, published in the journal Science a timeline of all known positive cases before the world knew a pandemic was starting. In his research, Worobey identifies a fishmonger who fell ill on December 11, 2019, as the first possible known Covid case in the world.
"Perhaps he is referring to a man named Luo, from the city of Jilin [northern China], who had been selling fish and turtles here for four years at one of the stalls. He was very ill in December, and the dates match, but we didn't know what was happening back then," recounted another time to this newspaper one of the species traders.
At the top of a hill 30 kilometers from the market is the Virology Institute, a 3,000 square meter complex that includes a P4 laboratory, the highest level of biosafety because it studies the most contagious pathogens, such as bat coronaviruses. Last year, the journal Nature published a series of data provided by virologist Shi Zhengli, a researcher at the Wuhan laboratory, trying to demonstrate that none of the viruses stored in their freezers are "ancestors of SARS-CoV-2."
But doubts still haunt the laboratory. A month ago, a committee of the United States Congress, controlled by Republicans, supported the leak theory as the cause of the pandemic, although they presented no evidence other than highlighting that the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), a government agency, had funded research on "gain of function" in Wuhan, which enhances viruses to find ways to combat them.
This January 23rd, there will be no official commemorations to remember the first closure of the pandemic. Wuhan, outwardly, has turned the page. But the scars remain, even if they are not visible. Like the pain of families who lost a loved one and are convinced they would have been saved if authorities had acted much earlier.
Speaking of this pain, Gao Hi, the former hotel receptionist, recounts the drama experienced by the family of an elderly man who, while heading to one of the overwhelmed hospitals amid the early quarantines, collapsed in front of a furniture store. He was found dead hours later by municipal officials dressed in protective suits. That image, captured on January 30, 2020, by Chilean photographer from AFP, Héctor Retamal, shocked the world and became one of the photos of the year.
According to Gao, that elderly man lying dead on the sidewalk was alone at home when he suddenly started feeling very ill and tried to walk to the hospital. His wife, son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren were confined in another house. "In Wuhan, we were the first in the world to experience the tragedy of elderly people dying alone, overwhelmed hospitals, bodies strewn in the hallways, and morgues full," Gao recalls. Wuhan will always bear the stigma of being the place where it all began.