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The first months of the pandemic were challenging for Xiao, as they were for everyone in Wuhan. His wife, now retired, spent her career as a doctor at Xiehe
Hospital, one of the first to report cases of what was later identified as the coronavirus, and
she’d begun hearing from colleagues in mid-January about the impending crisis. Sick residents “were lining up outside Xiehe at 10 p.m. in the freezing cold,” many of them “older people who could barely make it,” Xiao recalled. “Patients were
really desperately looking for help.” He and his wife had stocked up on food before the lockdown began, but three weeks in they started to run out. Unlike in Europe and the U.S., Wuhan’s containment measures made it difficult for people to leave
their buildings, even to buy groceries, forcing them to rely on delivery apps, government drop-offs, and neighbors who wrangled permission to go out. At one point, Xiao had to spend 26 yuan (almost $4) for a single cabbage, more than triple the usual
price. Some of the vegetables provided by local officials were barely edible.

He returned in late March to a company in severe trouble. Orders in the first half of the year were headed for a 50% drop, with demand from food deliveries failing to offset the calamitous decline in air travel. The government had made
some financial
help available, but Xiao wasn’t sure he’d be able to avoid layoffs. “Back
in January and February, I was expecting things to come back to normal in April,” he said. Instead, “I was just calling the bank this morning to tell
them that I can’t
repay the interest on our loan.”
relates to Inside the Dystopian, Post-Lockdown World of Wuhan
A customer in the waiting area set up outside a bank.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie for Bloomberg Businessweek

For a country that’s experienced an essentially uninterrupted boom throughout
the living memory of anyone younger than 50, broad-based economic pain is deeply unfamiliar. The Chinese economy shrank 6.8% in the first quarter of the year, and the
International Monetary Fund estimates it will grow just 1.2% in 2020, the worst
performance since 1976. Urban unemployment, a widely scrutinized indicator of overall joblessness, rose to a record 6.2% in February before pulling back slightly in March.
And it’s not clear what China’s business model will look like in a world where Europe, the U.S., and other key markets for its goods are flirting with a
depression.

Xiao is 64, part of a Chinese generation that had seen more than its share of history even before the coronavirus emerged. But he struggled to recall anything in his experience that was more dramatic, save perhaps the famine of the Great Leap Forward,
when he was a young child. “This is the biggest crisis of my lifetime,” he said.
relates to Inside the Dystopian, Post-Lockdown World of Wuhan
The entrance to Biandanshan Cemetery.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie for Bloomberg Businessweek

The entrance to Wuhan’s Biandanshan Cemetery is marked by an impressive stone
gate with a pagoda-style roof and a frieze of a ferocious-looking dragon. But in recent weeks, it’s been partly hidden behind a series of bright yellow crowd control
barriers surrounded by temporary metal fencing and watched carefully by police.
Almost no one is permitted to enter until April 30, and even then access is likely to be strictly controlled.

Officially, no patients in Wuhan are still dying from Covid-19, but the treatment of those who did pass away remains an extremely sensitive subject. On
Tomb-Sweeping Day in early April, when Chinese families traditionally gather to
pay respects to their
ancestors, Wuhan’s cemeteries were kept closed. Funerals have been banned until at least the end of the month, and family members of the dead have reported pressure from government officials to mourn quickly and quietly. According to the government,
these measures are purely a matter of public health, because family gatherings are a potential vector for infection. But the restrictions also help Beijing avoid having funerals become a venue for people to vent anger about how the epidemic was handled,
or to ask uncomfortable questions about subjects such as China’s true death toll.

Whatever the reasons for maintaining the ban, some mental health providers in Wuhan have expressed fears that the inability to properly mourn loved ones will
have deep and enduring psychological consequences. The city’s residents were the first to
undergo the unprecedented social shutdown that’s been repeated around the world, and it seems certain to mark many of them for a long time, especially if
it’s compounded by a prolonged economic slump.

Yao Jun is among those struggling to move on. The petite 50-year-old is the founder and general manager of Wuhan Welhel Photoelectric Co., a manufacturer of welding helmets and protective masks that exports to France, Germany, and the U.S. She came back
to work on March 13 after wading through approvals from four layers of government, including her local neighborhood committee, which took 15 days to assess Welhel’s ability to prevent infections. “We can’t afford to have a
single one,” Yao said
in an interview at her factory. Every day the production line can run is crucial: Welhel was trying to catch up on orders it hadn’t been able to complete in the first few months of the year, even as Yao wasn’t sure her customers in locked-down
overseas markets would be able to take the deliveries. She had no idea when more business would come in, given what’s happening to the global economy. relates to Inside the Dystopian, Post-Lockdown World of Wuhan
Yao Jun at the Welhel factory.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie for Bloomberg Businessweek

Despite the uncertainties, she was trying to focus on work rather than what the
city had just gone through. “I can’t see news about medical workers without
crying,” Yao said, choking back tears and rubbing a jade keychain attached to
her phone. She
was having trouble sleeping, as she turned over the stories of doctors and nurses who’d succumbed to Covid-19 again and again in her head: “I don’t know these people, but if someone tells me what happened to them, it’s devastating. These deaths
aren’t just numbers or strange names to me. They’re vivid lives.” She believed that many of her neighbors and colleagues were experiencing similar emotions but might not be willing or able to talk about them. “Many other people are traumatized
but can’t recognize the problem or express their feelings,” she said.

The pandemic was causing Yao to rethink her life. She spent almost half of last
year on the road, often visiting clients overseas. Now, she said, she wanted to
spend much more time at home, keeping her family close. Her son was supposed to
return to
Australia for university in February, but he was unable to get there, for obvious reasons. Yao didn’t want him to go back.
relates to Inside the Dystopian, Post-Lockdown World of Wuhan
A Welhel employee sprays disinfectant.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie for Bloomberg Businessweek

Even after seemingly world-shattering events, human behavior has a way of reverting to the mean. In the weeks after Sept. 11, commentators predicted the end of globalization, of the skyscraper, of irony—which all, needless to say,
persisted. Within a
couple of years of the global financial crisis, banks and homebuyers were back to arranging risky mortgages, and the very wealthy were back to, and then well beyond, pre-2008 levels of excess.

It’s reasonable to think this time will be different. Hardly anyone alive today has endured a pandemic this severe, and the basic problem it’s created—that anyone, whether friend, family, or stranger, might be a vector for lethal infection—is
uniquely corrosive to the daily interactions that keep countries and economies going. An effective vaccine could be at least a year off, and given what the world has learned about how quickly a novel pathogen can shut everything down, even that might not
return things to the way they were. Wuhan was the first place to traverse both sides of the Covid-19 curve, and how it changes, or doesn’t, in the disease’s aftermath will say a lot to the rest of us.

Many of the city’s methods won’t be universally applicable. Few other governments could assemble the all-seeing anti-viral surveillance China is trying to put in place, even if they wanted to. Fewer still, probably, have populations that would
tolerate it. But whatever the tactics, the key lesson of Wuhan could be that the price of beating the virus is never-ending vigilance and a reordering of priorities that will be hard for many to accept.
relates to Inside the Dystopian, Post-Lockdown World of Wuhan
A man being tested for Covid-19 outside a health center.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie for Bloomberg Businessweek

At a Starbucks in one of Wuhan’s fancier shopping districts, Ma Renren, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who runs a small marketing agency, talked about how he
was sorting out these questions for himself. The store was open but only serving drinks to go,
with customers permitted to sit at outdoor tables. Security guards were keeping
a close eye on things, interrupting conversations to tell patrons to keep their
masks on between sips and not sit too close together. Ma, who was wearing fashionably oversize
glasses, a black baseball cap, and—of course—a light blue medical mask, had
gone to stay at his parents’ apartment on Jan. 24, intending to help take care of them. But soon he began to suspect that he might be sick. It was a time
of greatly
heightened emotion: No one knew the true fatality rate, and people in Wuhan were seeing reports on social media of appalling conditions in overwhelmed hospitals. “I wrote my last words one night and decided to say farewell to my
parents and go to the
hospital alone the next morning,” Ma recalled. “I knew that if I went, I couldn’t necessarily expect to come back.”

He changed his mind at the last minute and eventually felt better, though the psychological effects lingered. He began having panic attacks, his breath short
and his heart pounding. After looking up the symptoms online, he concluded that
he was
experiencing post-traumatic stress. Experiences like his, Ma thought, would make many people more introspective and more focused on those closest to them. “We will put aside more time for ourselves and our families” and for the other relationships
that seemed truly worth holding on to during the crisis, he said. “Misfortune
tests the sincerity of friendship.”

Ma was now trying to get his company back on its feet. The government had recently sent him a tax rebate as part of its stimulus measures, but this would
help only so much. Tourism has collapsed, and few potential clients have much money for promotion. �
�There’s nothing to do but move on,” he said. Ma had, inevitably, lowered his ambitions, and for the time being he was all right with that. “We worked nonstop for years, chasing every opportunity,” he said. Now, “everyone I know has one goal
for 2020. It’s to survive.” —With assistance from Gao Yuan, Haze Fan, and
Jinshan Hong

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