'You don't know that feeling of terror': Wuhan's survivors find no closure from the coronavirus
The steelworker counted as corpses were dragged out of the hospital in twos and threes, loaded into funeral cars and driven away. Every body bag meant another empty bed and a chance for his father's survival.
Months of lockdown have wiped away the industrial center’s usual haze of pollution, revealing open skies over soaring bridges and pink water lilies floating on lakes. People line up for buckets of crayfish, snack on crunchy, spicy lotus roots, and linger at breakfast stalls serving sesame-paste noodles and tofu skin stuffed with rice.
Beijing has meanwhile made a hero out of Wuhan, the sacrificial city whose people struggled and died to stop a virus and save the nation. But many in Wuhan say they never asked for that burden, and now they spend their days remembering the ones they lost while trying to make sense of what lies ahead.
By the fourth day, his father was losing consciousness. He lost movement in his right arm and started punching the air and trying to pull off his oxygen mask with his left arm. Yang scolded him. “You’re trying to kill me,” his father said. Only on Jan. 20 did Zhong Nanshan, a doctor famous for speaking up during the SARS epidemic, announce on state TV that there was human-to-human transmission. Three days later, the city of 11 million was locked down.
“There was no way to save them. Not enough beds, not enough equipment, not enough facilities, not enough people,” he said. “As a doctor, you feel helpless, trying to help them breathe. You’re just watching their oxygen go down, down, down, and you can’t do anything. You can’t keep up.” One night, an ambulance dropped off an old man and woman in a Qiaokou district neighborhood, then sped away. They were Grandma Wu and Grandpa Xu, both 94. Their daughter who lived upstairs usually took care of them. But she had been hospitalized with COVID-19 on Jan. 28, and died two days later.
“We’d already lost one, my sister. And my dad died without any reason or clarity. We have no idea how he died. What happened when he came home? What did he die of?” the daughter said. Her mother began to cry. “In Wuhan, those who’ve had the sickness also feel different from those who haven’t. You don’t know that feeling of terror,” said Grandma Wu's daughter. “We wrote our own wills and prepared to die.”
“We were trying so hard to tell the world," Liu said. “Yet with their free press and free speech, they still failed. Why in the world did it become like this?” The way people attacked one another reminded him of scenes he'd seen during lockdown: Infected people had spat on elevator buttons out of spite, and screamed at volunteers,"If I can't live, no one else can live!" Sometimes he'd felt like screaming, too.
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