Covid is back again to where it all started. Wuhan, the Chinese city that went famous worldwide as the first city to record the deadly outbreak of the coronavirus.

Deja vu? It’s bad news all over again. In 2020, the Chinese government has taken decisive action by building hospitals over the course of a weekend and shut down the entire city to curb the pandemic from infecting its 11 million citizens.

It worked. Wuhan went on to become virus-free since the initial outbreak due to aggressive testing, contact tracing, and mitigation efforts like social distancing and wearing masks.

This time it’s a little different. Delta-variant has proven to be far more infectious and the usual method to prevent it couldn’t keep up with the pace of the infection. More and more people got infected in Wuhan, while the numbers don’t look significant in charts, they’re steadily increasing with each passing day. They’re among more than 400 infections diagnosed across China that only started last month in the eastern city of Nanjing.

The current outbreak in Wuhan has been a huge blow to China, where they once cleared the entire city of the virus. Despite the city’s status as the main attraction from both China and abroad, the city can’t be over-prioritized over others as the Hubei governor Wang Zhonglin said in a statement posted on the provincial government’s website late Monday night.

At the moment, it doesn’t look as though the cases will go back to the time when the pandemic started. It’s a common situation in the developing world where the vaccination rate isn’t as fast as most people hoped. China has one of the world’s highest immunization rates, with nearly 1.7 billion shots given, enough to protect about 60% of the population. Even touted as less effective it’s a much better option than to simply go without any vaccination.

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Source : Bloomberg