Wuhan, SAEDNEWS, Jan. 18: Video footage from Wuhan during the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak shows how the Chinese government could have done more to prevent the coronavirus from spreading, and its attempts to stop journalists from reporting on it.
In 3 Days that Stopped the World, two Chinese journalists, through undercover filming and diaries, reveal the almost overnight transformation of the city of 11 million people as nonchalance about the virus was replaced by panic and overcrowded hospitals within hours. The journalists’ names have been not been disclosed for their safety.
The exclusive footage, recorded between January 19 and January 22, 2020, has never been seen before. Unable to publish it inside China, the journalists gave it to Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, which smuggled it out of the country.
Yang Jun and Chen Wei, whose names have been anonymised for their protection, travelled to Wuhan days before the city went into a full lockdown, when the official number of cases was only in the low hundreds and the Chinese government was tight-lipped with the amount information it shared.
As the journalists moved between hospitals increasingly full of patients and the Huanan seafood market, regarded as the epicentre of the outbreak, they were stopped time and again by police and security guards.
Initially, as the journalists arrived in Wuhan on January 19, 2020, the severity of the virus was still unknown and human-to-human transmission was not yet confirmed.
As a result, citizens responded relatively nonchalantly to questions about the outbreak. People did not wear masks and called it worse than the flu, but not as bad as the SARS outbreaks between 2002 and 2004, which killed almost 800 people worldwide.
“When I arrive, people seem to have no fear or concern about the virus at all. Some haven’t even heard about it,” Jun wrote in his diary.
“A stall owner asks me to take off my mask. He says ‘You are obviously an over-worried outsider. Everything is fine here,'” Jun continued.
To watch the video published by these investigative journalists of the first three days of the outbreak in Wuhan click here. (Source: AlJazeera).
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