A little further away, a young motorcycle delivery man for pre-cooked meals agrees with him.
“Everyone has returned to a normal life. They stay with family, with friends, go out to have fun or travel. They smile again,” explains Liang Feicheng. “We are no longer worried and restless like then,” says this delivery man, who wore glasses and a mask to protect himself from the icy cold.
The confinement in January 2020, announced in the middle of the night and applied a few hours later, took the inhabitants of this Chinese metropolis by surprise. Airports and train stations, as well as road connections, were closed.
Wuhan was cut off from the world for 76 days, with its inhabitants locked in their homes and hospitals overwhelmed by the arrival of the sick.
But the chaos of three years ago is now a thing of the past.
“The House of Hope”
In front of a store where the AFP photographed a corpse lying on the sidewalk, they opened a school whose name seems to be a nod to the overcoming of that critical period: “La Casa de la Esperanza”.
The Huanan seafood market, which was suspected to be the epicenter of the epidemic, closed in 2020. Large blue barriers continue to protect that place, in front of which was a police vehicle, according to AFP.
Despite the return to normality of the inhabitants of Wuhan, as well as in the rest of China, this does not mean that the coronavirus has disappeared from the Asian giant.
About 80% of the population in China contracted covid-19 since the lifting of sanitary restrictions in early December, according to epidemiologist Wu Zunyu, a benchmark in the country in the fight against the virus.
China reported this weekend at least 13,000 new deaths “related to covid-19” between January 13 and 19.
This figure, which only reflects those who died in hospitals, is in addition to the 60,000 deaths since December, previously announced by the authorities.
Undoubtedly, it is a partial balance in a country with 1,400 million inhabitants, in which numerous hospitals and crematoriums were overwhelmed during the past month.