Published : 2025-01-23
On January 23, 2020, in response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, China's Wuhan in Hubei Province announced a city-wide "lockdown."
The COVID-19 pandemic is the public health emergency that is most rapidly spreading and widely infecting since the founding of the People's Republic of China.
According to the notice issued by the government in the early hours of the day, starting at 10 am, all urban buses, subways, ferries, and long-distance transportation in the city would suspend operation.
Without special reasons, citizens should not leave Wuhan. The channels for leaving Wuhan via the airport and train station would be temporarily closed.
Subsequent media reports from Xinhua News Agency indicated that the decision to "lockdown" Wuhan was a "resolute choice and decisive action" by the President Xi Jinping.
"On the afternoon of January 22, General Secretary Xi Jinping, assessed the situation and issued important instructions, demanding strict traffic control measures on the movement of people and external passage in Hubei Province and Wuhan City immediately."
Before this, the Wuhan Municipal Centre for Disease Control and Prevention had been monitoring and discovered cases of unknown pneumonia starting in late December 2019. By late January 2020, the number of visits to fever clinics in Wuhan had rapidly increased.
Subsequently, a high-level expert group, including academician Zhong Nanshan (鍾南山) from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, rushed to Wuhan on January 18 to conduct on-site investigations, confirming that human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus had occurred.
