Wuhan prepares to open up
Lesson summary
Hi everyone, welcome back to another Plain English lesson, this time number 252 on this Monday, April 20, 2020. This is week number six for me in self-quarantine. Yikes. You can find the full lesson online at PlainEnglish.com/252.
Coming up today: The city of Wuhan, China is starting to lift restrictions on travel and daily life. What does life look like in the city where it all started? The expression we’ll talk about in the second half of the program is “pent-up.”
Wuhan loosens travel restrictions
Seventy-six days. That’s how long residents of Wuhan, China, were in lockdown before the government began lifting restrictions about two weeks ago. The lockdown was harsh in Wuhan. Most people were not allowed to even leave their homes, except to buy food or do essential tasks. Very few were allowed to leave the city: train service was suspended and main highways were closed and guarded. The government tracked the health of citizens through a smartphone app: only people who had tested negative got the green code that let them go outside.
Life is not exactly back to normal, but the harshest restrictions are being lifted. People are allowed to go outside. Highways re-opened and train service started again. Residents could drive their own cars and go outside. Some people are going back to work.
Wuhan is home to a lot of heavy industry, including auto manufacturing. Many of the biggest factories have started up again, though some of the smaller and medium-sized businesses are not yet up and running.
Wuhan residents approached newfound freedom with caution. Many employers asked people not to take public transit to work, encouraging employees to either drive or walk. People still had to pass temperature checks to go inside public buildings. Restrictions were not lifted uniformly: different neighborhoods had different rules, according to a patchwork of local regulations.
Residents are busy satisfying pent-up demand for a range of goods and services. There was a spike in demand for weddings, as well as for train tickets. Wuhan residents streamed out of the city as soon as they were able. Roadways opened up at midnight on April 8. In the early dawn hours, about sixty-five thousand people left the city by car, bus, or train.
Many people were satisfying their desires to travel to see friends and family. The first passenger flight to leave Wuhan was bound for Sanya, a destination known for its beaches. But others had been stuck in Wuhan, victims of circumstance. They had been stranded away from home this whole time. The crisis broke out during the Lunar New Year, so many people had been visiting family in Wuhan, only to find that they couldn’t go back home.
All is not yet clear for those stranded travelers leaving Wuhan. Several cities, including Shenzhen and Guangzhou will require travelers from Wuhan to self-quarantine to make sure they don’t bring the virus with them to those cities. Beijing required Wuhan residents to get a permit before booking an inbound train. Many of those who did travel doubled-up on face masks and wore hazmat suits as they boarded buses and trains. Flight attendants wore goggles.
Wuhan has seen new cases slow to a trickle. It even had one day without any new cases. Many of the new cases in China are the result of infections from abroad, the Chinese government said.
One challenge China will face is keeping the disease from making a resurgence, especially from imported cases from other countries. An outbreak in a western city, thought to be brought into the country from Russia, was a reminder that different regions of the world are at different stages of the crisis.
China started to loosen restrictions on daily life just as countries like Japan and India were implementing them. Other countries in between, like Italy, Spain, and the US, appeared to be turning a corner, but were still weeks away from even contemplating opening up again. Early signs are that China will loosen travel restrictions from within its own borders but will continue to apply heavy scrutiny to anyone coming into the country from abroad.
The people of Wuhan have borne a unique psychological burden during these last few months. Their city is now synonymous with a virus that has infected over 2 million people and killed over a hundred thousand. Today, Wuhan residents are seen as heroes for having lived through the strictest lockdown in the country.
But it wasn’t always that way. Residents from Wuhan, but who were stranded away from home when the outbreak began, faced a stigma inside and outside China, often being refused service in hotels and told to go to “relief stations,” glorified refugee shelters. Their mission now is to try, as much as possible, to reclaim their city’s reputation for cherry blossom trees and industrial strength, rather than for this year’s pandemic.
Live events on Zoom
The live events we’ve been doing are a lot of fun. I’ve corresponded with so many of you over the years by email and now it’s nice to see your faces and hear your voices on live calls. It’s great to open up the call, see the names on the participant list, and recognize some of you from our e-mail correspondence.
We’ve done a few styles of calls lately. One style has been more of a relaxed, conversation-style call. The other has been more formal where I go through some slides on how to talk about a certain topic. The formats are a little different, but both are fun. And people have really liked them.
The best way to know about those events is to join our e-mail list at PlainEnglish.com/mail . From there, we send out emails when we are going to have calls in your time zone. So get on that list and we’ll invite you to a future live call with JR and myself. PlainEnglish.com/mail
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