Wuhan, China slowly lifts lockdown

City reopens borders, restarts metro services

The Chinese city of Wuhan began lifting a two-month lockdown on Saturday.

According to Reuters, the city already restarted some metro services and is reopening borders.

Wuhan is where the first case of coronavirus was recorded in late December, and accounts for the 60 percent of China’s total reported cases.

But the numbers have fallen sharply in recent weeks, following the city’s draconian measures to stop people from entering or leaving the 11-million strong industrial city in central China.

Families were confined to their homes. Only essential stores were allowed to remain open.

Mainland China now has 81,394 cases, with the death toll rising by three to 3,295, the National Health Commission of China revealed. The last confirmed locally transmitted case of the virus in Wuhan was on Monday.

Despite the drop in statistics, Wuhan authorities cannot let their guard down.

Authorities and volunteers patrolled the railway station in the morning. They are handing out disinfectants and putting up signs reminding everyone the need to take a mobile-phone based health code to use the public transport.

Meanwhile, China closed its borders to foreign nationals who already obtained or have valid Chinese visas and residence permits.

Bill Gates acknowledges importance of ‘severe’ lockdown

In a live CNN interview, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-founder Bill Gates expressed his approval on doing a lockdown in the US, not just for particular states but for the entire country.

Upon seeing Wuhan’s success in the #FlattenTheCurve advocacy, Gates commented: “The total number of cases there [now] is very, very small. And that’s very good news.”

“If we do it right, we’ll only have to do it once for six to 10 weeks. But it has to be the whole country,” Gates continued. “We have to raise the level of testing and the prioritization of that mass testing quite dramatically.”