The recovery in Wuhan began with sound. The sound of the blows on the construction site, the shouting of the vegetable market in the alley, and the whistle on the Yangtze River Bridge are intertwined with each other. People who are used to being "premature", people who start walking their dogs and walking again, come out of various intersections and try to get back to their old lives.
The first impression of the unsealed night is the light, such as the light show on both sides of the Yangtze River, and the headlights on the high-speed toll station. Rarely, such days, such as after a long period of gloomy weather, finally met with belated thunder and rain, washing away all the dust and filth.
According to the notice of the Hubei Provincial Covid-19 Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters, from 00:00 on April 8, Wuhan resumed external traffic in an orderly manner, and the card points for the control of the Han Passage were uniformly withdrawn. This means that Wuhan finally ushered in the moment of unsealing after 76 days. Each high-speed toll station, Tianhe Airport and the three major railway stations, opened the closed doors at the same time.
People who have been stranded here for a long time finally have the opportunity to return to the past track, to work in the field, to visit relatives in their hometowns, or to transit here. Life, which had been pressed the pause button for a long time, was back in motion.
Morning market, grocery shopping and dog walkers. Photo by reporter/Liu Yuanhang
0:00 Wudong Expressway toll station
All the waiting was just for the carp to jump at the door, and the running session before the whistle sounded was particularly long. On the evening of April 7, vehicles lined up at the upcoming Wudong Expressway toll booth. At this time, there are still five minutes before Wuhan is unsealed. In the darkness, the full picture of all the vehicles could not be seen, only the eager beam of light from the headlights, coming from the farther darkness, hinting at the mood of everyone who left the city.
Such scenes took place at various major highway intersections in Wuhan. At the Wuhan West Expressway toll station, traffic flows to Jingzhou and Yichang. The Wudong toll station, located in the southeast corner of Wuhan, is the only way to Huanggang and Ezhou. Since the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, the gates to enter and exit from here have been closed.
This is the fifth time that Wuhan citizen Zhang Lu has come to the Wudong Expressway toll station, and she has failed the first four times. On the evening of the 7th, she drove to the Wudong toll gate with a few friends of the same age. After confirming that she could leave the city, she returned the same way and prepared to officially leave at seven o'clock in the morning. Her sister, who works at the blood bank center in Huanggang, has been isolated from each other for more than two months.
At 00:00 on the 8th, the police responsible for maintaining order withdrew from the middle of the road. With the noisy whistle and the lights in the darkness, the dense traffic flows forward like the river when the flood is discharged. A family of three drove to witness this exciting moment. The mother and daughter duo took pictures behind the fence, and the daughter jumped up happily, and finally unsealed, as if after a long silence, it needed a sound to wake up the air around her.
In the early morning of the 8th, the Wudong Expressway toll station. Photo by reporter/Liu Yuanhang
07:25 Wuhan Tianhe Airport
From 00:00 on April 8, Wuhan Tianhe Airport resumed domestic passenger flights. Yuan Zheyi is an aircraft dispatcher at Wuhan Tianhe Airport. Aircraft dispatch is considered to be the brain of flight operation, responsible for the planning of each flight, and jointly authorizing the release with the captain.
The day before the unsealing, Yuan Zheyi's work began to become busy, and he flew 7 flights in the morning, all of which were chartered flights for foreign medical teams to leave Wuhan, with a total of more than 800 people. In the afternoon, Yuan Zheyi and his colleagues were busy scheduling the flight plan of No. 8 and preparing for the unsealing.
During the 76 days of lockdown, Tianhe Airport did not stop operating, but the work content was much less. On the evening of Chinese New Year's Eve, the day after the lockdown, the first charter flights of foreign medical teams landed at Tianhe Airport, starting with three aircraft from the Air Force and then from Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Except for the occasional ups and downs of the epidemic prevention charter flight, and some related farewell activities, the entire airport appeared particularly empty during the 76 days of lockdown, and basically no one could be seen. Yuan Zheyi lives in Wuchang District and carries a pass to and from work. The life of the ban and the direction of the epidemic have changed everyone's heart, and the fear of the virus and the anger of the facts have been replaced by the subsequent numbness, "good is like this, bad is also like this"
Near 12 o'clock in the evening, Yuan Zheyi had just finished his duty, and there were not many people outside the airport. "Usually at this point, a large number of planes return to Wuhan, and there should be a lot of taxis and private cars on the airport highway, but now the highway is empty." He told China News Weekly.
At 7:25 a.m. on the 8th, China Eastern Airlines MU2527 took off from the airport, becoming the first flight after the "air channel" was unblocked, and the destination was Sanya, Hainan, with a total of 46 passengers on board.
"Two five two turns" is Yuan Zheyi's name for the first flight from Han, MU2527. Although the city was unsealed, the number of flights on the 8th was not much, only one-fifth of the usual. The epidemic is not over, and airlines have deliberately restricted the number of flights.
At 11:00 a.m., Liu Tingting, a nurse who aided E' Hubei, came to Tianhe Airport with the team and boarded a flight to Changchun. They were the last retreating medical teams from the rehabilitation station.
A month ago, Liu Tingting arrived in Wuhan, a nurse at Changchun Cancer Hospital, when a group of 16 people took more than 20 hours on a train and got off from Wuchang Station. At that time, Liu Tingting and her colleagues found that Wuhan was quiet, there was no one on the street, and their task was to support the Yangtze River New Town Rehabilitation Station in Jiang'an District, working more than 8 hours a day.
The rehabilitation station originally had thousands of patients recovering, and she was responsible for nearly a hundred patients in one ward. A month later, more and more people returned home from the rehabilitation station, and more and more residents walking and riding shared bicycles on the street, and the mission of Liu Tingting and colleagues was gradually completed. In the past two days, local medical staff have completely taken over the rehabilitation station.
At 8:30 in the morning, the young couple came to register. Photo by reporter/Liu Yuanhang
8:30 Marriage Registration Office, Wuchang Civil Affairs Bureau
The day before the Wuchang District Civil Affairs Bureau's marriage registration office opened for on-site processing, the staff had already begun to work, and in front of the marriage registration entrance, a long strip was posted every 1.5 meters to prompt the safe distance before and after the queue. The thin yellow line reminds the love and worry of the special period.
The staff at the door revealed to China News Weekly that every day's marriage registration needs to be made in advance, and the number is released every day until it is finished, so as to divert the number of people. On the 8th, the registry issued 10 places for divorce and 20 places for marriage.
At 8 a.m., Ms. Chen arrived at the marriage registry office, half an hour earlier than the earliest opening hours. She came to remarry her ex-husband, and was going to do it on February 14, but because of the epidemic, it was nearly two months late. She chose to go through the formalities with her ex-husband on the day of the unsealing on April 8, which is a souvenir.
Ms. Chen still took the photo registered when she was married, and ten minutes later, she got a new marriage certificate, which was no different from the original marriage certificate, but the date changed. Ms. Chen's husband is a teacher in the senior high school graduation class, and has recently been busy giving students online lessons, and each time the content has to be made into a PPT, involving a lot of time and energy.
At 8:30, Wang Yibing and his girlfriend came to go through the marriage registration procedures. They made a reservation on the 6th, when the 9 o'clock quota was full, and he finally chose 10 o'clock. At zero o'clock, Wuhan officially lifted the control of the passage from Han, he was very excited, sent a circle of friends. "On the first day wuhan was unsealed, we got married." Worried that there were too many people at the marriage registry office, they came early.
Before the outbreak, Wang Yibing was the owner of a barbecue shop near Hubei University of Technology, and his girlfriend opened a milk tea shop next to Hubei University. Due to the lockdown in Wuhan, he still can't resume work, and his income plummets. In two months, the cost of living alone cost twenty thousand yuan.
Even if the city is unsealed, it is difficult for residents' consumption and eating habits to return to their original state in a short period of time, and for small business owners like Wang Yibing, the catering industry is still difficult to do. There was restrained joy on that face, and there was no sight of these hidden worries.
9:30 Wuhan Railway Station and Wuchang Railway Station
Wuchang Railway Station Entrance. Photo by reporter/Liu Yuanhang
In the early morning of the 8th, the three railway stations in Wuhan, Wuchang and Hankou were full of people who were preparing to go to other provinces to work, those who were trapped in Wuhan as a result of the transfer, and those who were stranded for more than two months.
According to the official website of 12306, on April 8, 276 passenger trains will depart from stations in Wuhan to Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Fuzhou, Nanning and other places, of which 54 trains will start in Wuhan. Judging from the pre-sale of tickets on April 7, more than 55,000 passengers are expected to leave Han by train on April 8, of which passengers going to the Pearl River Delta region are more concentrated, accounting for about 40% of the total number of passengers leaving Han.
The first train departing from Hankou Station to Jingzhou at 6:25 a.m. was D9301, and the first train departing outside Hubei Province was G431 from Wuhan Station to Nanning East at 7:06.
Wuhan station at 7:00 a.m. on April 8. Photo by Reporter/Du Wei
Wuhan Station East Entrance waiting for incoming passengers. Photo by reporter/Du Wei
Just after 7 o'clock, there was a queue waiting to leave Han outside the east entrance of Wuhan Station, where there were young people who went home to visit relatives but stayed in Wuhan and could not resume work, there were 20-year-old girls who came to visit their boyfriends from Guangzhou, and there were wives who were separated from their husbands for two months because of the "lockdown" in Wuhan, and after a brief reunion, they embarked on a journey to return to work. The station staff used a loudspeaker to prompt passengers to prepare a "health code" in advance, take the temperature, and verify the identity before they can get on the train.
At about 8:20 a.m., the queue at the east entrance was in an "L" shape, and the vehicles parked on the roadside at the entrance were congested. There is a special entrance to Beijing at the west entrance station, today there is only one train to Beijing G4802 times, departing at 9 o'clock in the morning, compared with the passengers at the east entrance, the passenger flow here is much less, and the procedure for returning to Beijing is much stricter than other places.
Wuhan Station inbound passenger flow. Photo by reporter/Du Wei
The relevant person in charge of the Wuhan Railway Station Station Office told the "China News Weekly" reporter that to go to Beijing, in addition to the healthy green code of Hubei Province, it is also necessary to apply for returning to Beijing through the "Return to Beijing Service" menu in the "Beijing Heart Help" Mini Program, select the number of trains, and after approval, obtain the pass code to return to Beijing, as well as the specific number of trains and time information. From April 9, if you want to return to Beijing, you must first do a nucleic acid test. On the side of the west entrance of Wuhan Station, there are relevant responsible persons of various districts of Wuhan sitting in a row, and if passengers do not meet the conditions for returning to Beijing, they will be sent back to their communities.
At the west entrance station, 42-year-old Jiang Maolin is helping his parents in their seventies to call up the health code, and today, parents and children in junior high school will leave Wuhan together and return to Tianjin, where their children go to school. Mr. and Mrs. Jiang Maolin have been working hard in Wuhan for 10 years, and have opened a company that has been mainly engaged in the production of foam plastic and paper-plastic packaging products, with a scale of about 200 people. According to the practice of previous years, the family's New Year reunion is mostly in Wuhan, sometimes in Tianjin, and this year happens to be in Wuhan for the New Year. A few days ago, Jiang Maolin booked a business seat for parents and children through the online travel service platform, in order to have fewer people, he also took the initiative to do nucleic acid testing for three people, and contacted the community in Tianjin to understand the mutual recognition of Hubei health code and Tianjin health code.
Jiang Maolin's company resumed work on March 15, and on March 18, the resumed workers did nucleic acid testing. Only a dozen people initially resumed work, each of whom was required to live in a single room. In the past two days, the company's resumption rate has reached 95%. It was also at the end of March that Jiang Maolin found that pedestrians and vehicles in Wuhan began to increase.
Zhou Dazheng sat in a chair outside the west square of Wuchang Station, waiting for the train home. He was from Jingzhou, Hubei Province, and bought a ticket at 5:50 p.m. The washed white clothes had the words "Foxconn" printed on it, the same overalls he had worked as a cleaning hour in the factory more than a decade ago.
Before the outbreak, Zhou Dazheng worked as a nurse at Wuhan Tianyou Hospital. In mid-January, he heard about the unknown pneumonia in the hospital. On January 23, The lockdown began in Wuhan, and medical teams from other places were stationed in various hospitals and took over the wards, including the care of patients.
Zhou Dazheng left Tianyou Hospital and settled in a hostel for two months. The room rate is 80 per day, only two meals a day, breakfast is free, each time it is called takeaway, and it costs a total of six thousand to eat and live. Unable to go out every day, "like going to jail", often more than 10 yuan of takeaway food is handed over from the gap in the doorway on the first floor. There was nothing else to do in the room, he watched TV every day or played landlord games on his phone.
After staying in Wuhan, Zhou Dazheng's wife and children were worried, but there was no way. After returning to Jingzhou this time, he was ready not to come out to work again, after all, he was 72 years old, the family still had 8 acres of cotton land, and his son was a driver of a truck, so he decided to take care of farm work at home.
12:00 Mall Pedestrian Street
Walking on Jianghan Road Pedestrian Street, shoe shops and clothing stores have been open for several days, although at more than seven o'clock in the evening, some have closed their doors. Some of the pedestrians sat on the side of the road and talked, and some were walking.
On Baohua Street in Jiang'an District, there was a long line of customers in front of the milk tea shop. In Jiqing Street, Cai Ji hot dry noodles and Tian Hengqi fresh fish paste soup powder also began to soothe the taste buds of Wuhan people as early as half a month ago. On Nanjing Road, takeaway brothers, passing vehicles, and pedestrians have given here some more vitality and fireworks, although in the eyes of old Wuhan people, such a scene is still quite a distance from the usual life.
April 7 at 7 p.m. Jianghan Road Pedestrian Street. Photo by Reporter/Du Wei
April 7 at 5 p.m. Nanjing Road. Photo by Reporter/Du Wei
Not far from Nanjing Road, which is located in the city center, it is an old street known to locals - Tiansheng Street. At about 7 p.m. on April 7, a small shop called "Fat Man Parity" was still opening its doors, and the owner, Zha Jianmin, had been operating here for more than 20 years, the first time it had closed for more than two months. The store has just reopened for a few days, and there are twenty or thirty businesses a day, which is still a lot worse than the usual hundreds of businesses.
Opposite, a restaurant selling aquatic products and seafood is preparing to open on April 8. Wang Wen, the owner of a shop selling bedding next door, said that bedding belongs to the seasonal business after the year and year, the turnover of the day before the New Year in previous years has tens of thousands of yuan, this year to catch up with the "lockdown" of Wuhan, the turnover of the first two days of the New Year is only one or two thousand yuan per day, rest for nearly three months, the rent of the shop every month is six thousand yuan, and the boss calls, the other party said not to reduce, plus living expenses, a lot of expenses, these two days to reopen, there is no business. During SARS in 2003, Wang Wen also tinkered with the sale of masks, and this time the new crown virus was too contagious, and she was afraid. The eldest son is married, she has grandchildren, and the younger son has not yet started a family. Thinking about taking more grandchildren and seeing her younger son start a family made her risk her life and "afraid of death".
Another shop selling fruits and vegetables is still lit up, just opened on the 6th, but the boss said that there are no customers, the reason why it has not closed, is because the day before two people came to buy some food at 8 o'clock in the evening, she still wants to wait today, to see if no one comes. "After two months off, many people don't have a salary, it's good to be able to ensure that they have to live, where there is so much money to buy things," she lamented.
At 8 p.m. on April 7, a bedding shop on Tiansheng Street had just reopened. Photo by reporter/Du Wei
At 8 p.m. on April 7, a meat, egg and fruit and vegetable shop on Tiansheng Street. Photo by reporter/Du Wei
At 7 p.m. on April 7, the "Fat Man Affordable" shop on Tiansheng Street. Photo by reporter/Du Wei
Zha Jianmin told the "China News Weekly" reporter that there is a gap between the "unsealing" of Wuhan and what he thinks, and he is looking forward to the unsealing of the community so that he can have more business.