The Chinese city of Wuhan became famous around the world in 2020 as the epicenter of the deadly Covid-19 outbreak, which paralyzed much of the world and claimed millions of lives.
Five years later, the city is thriving, with bustling shopping districts, crowded food markets and paralyzed roads, as if the horrors of the pandemic never happened.
The megacity of 11 million people had a much higher death rate than the rest of China, with the first cases being detected in December 2019.
On January 23, 2020, Wuhan went into lockdown for 76 days in an effort to stop the spread of the mysterious virus, ushering in China’s zero-Covid era of strict health and travel controls, and foreshadowing the disruption that would affect to the rest of the world.
Now locals say the city’s association with the virus and its increased prominence has actually had a positive impact, with more tourists visiting in the wake of the devastation.
“Now everyone is paying more attention to Wuhan,” said Chen Ziyi, a 40-year-old resident. “They say Wuhan is the city of heroes,” he added in an apparent reference to the city’s lockdown efforts.
Visiting the city, journalists saw people walking dogs and strolling along the upscale Chuhe Hanjie shopping street in designer outfits, while others queued to pick up bubble tea orders, as they do in any bustling metropolis.
Locals thronged the Shanhaiguan Road breakfast market, eating bowls of noodles and fried pastries, and many people walked around happily without masks.
Earlier in the year, large crowds gathered on the city’s previously empty streets, releasing heart-shaped balloons proudly emblazoned with the city’s name as they celebrated New Year’s Eve.
People attend a New Year celebration in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province, on January 1, 2025.

Medical workers take swab samples from residents for testing for the COVID-19 coronavirus, on a street in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, May 15, 2020.

A young woman poses for photographs while holding balloons on a busy street in Wuhan in December.

Customers buy food at a stall in Wuhan, China, Sunday, July 21, 2024.
“People move forward, these memories become more and more blurred,” Jack He, a 20-year-old university student and resident of Wuhan, told AFP.
He was in high school when the lockdown was imposed and spent much of his sophomore year taking online classes from home. “We still feel that those years were especially hard… but a new life has begun,” he said.
But look closer and some signs of the city’s darkest days remain.
At the former site of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where scientists believe the virus may have jumped from animals to humans, a light blue wall was built to shield the market’s closed stalls from view.
Censorship, as throughout communist-ruled China, remains strict, and journalists investigating the effects of the pandemic roam the city.
One worker claimed that market administrators had sent security camera footage of AFP journalists to a mass group of stall owners on WeChat and warned them not to talk to journalists.
At least one black car followed AFP journalists throughout the city, including the new market.
When AFP visited the market, workers were putting up Chinese New Year decorations in the shop windows on the second floor of the market, where a maze of opticians still operates.
More than a dozen vendors at the aptly named Huanan New Seafood Market declined to talk about the market’s past.
One stall owner told AFP, on condition of anonymity, that “the business here is not what it was before.”

Shoppers walk past and enter a brightly decorated China Gold jewelry store in Wuhan in December.

Customers buy goods at a Russian-made goods hall in Wuhan, which opened last June.

Children select Spring Festival decorations at a supermarket in Wuhan city earlier this month.
There is nothing to indicate the importance of the place; in fact, there are no major memorials to the lives lost to the virus anywhere in the city.
At the former site of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where scientists believe the virus may have jumped from animals to humans, a light blue wall was built to shield the market’s closed stalls from view.
Official commemorations of the Wuhan lockdown ordeal focus on the heroism of doctors and the efficiency with which the city responded to the outbreak, despite international criticism of the local government’s censorship of the first cases in December 2019.
The market’s old produce stalls were moved to a new development outside the city centre, where it was clear the city was still in suspense over its reputation as the birthplace of the pandemic.
One of the few remaining public commemorations of the lockdown stands next to the abandoned Huoshenshan Hospital, a modest gas station that doubles as an “anti-Covid-19 pandemic educational base.”

A food vendor pulls a cart on a street in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province, on December 22, 2024, ahead of the fifth anniversary of the confirmation of his first death from Covid-19.

Huoshenshan Hospital, which was built in just a few days when cases spiked in early 2020, is now empty (pictured during construction)
One wall of the station was dedicated to a timeline of the closure, complete with faded photographs of President Xi Jinping visiting Wuhan in March 2020.
An employee told AFP that a small building behind the convenience store housed another exhibit, but it was only open “when leaders come to visit.”
Huoshenshan Hospital, which was built in just days as cases surged in early 2020, was once celebrated as a symbol of the Chinese city’s fight against the virus.
But the hospital now sits empty, hidden behind more recently built walls, faded like most traces of the pandemic as locals move on and officials discourage discussion of it.
The Covid pandemic is widely believed to have started in Wuhan, although there is debate among epidemiologists over whether it emanated from a wet market or the world’s leading coronavirus research laboratory located in the city.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where many scientists believe Covid may have originated, had been researching viruses that were distant relatives of Covid at the time of the outbreak.