The fifth anniversary of the first known death from Covid-19 passed virtually unnoticed in China on Saturday. On January 11, 2020, health officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan announced that a 61-year-old man had died of complications from pneumonia caused by a previously unknown virus.
Photo: SITA/AP, Dake Kang
A seafood market in Wuhan, China.
The death announcement came in China, where the pandemic is taboo, after authorities saw dozens of infections caused by the pathogen later named SARS-CoV-2 over several weeks. The latter unleashed a global pandemic that has so far killed more than seven million people and fundamentally changed the way of life around the world, including China.
There was no mention of the first case of a death from COVID-19 in the Beijing-controlled official media. Just a few videos circulating on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, noted the anniversary, but otherwise stuck to the official version of events. The posts on the 5th anniversary of the first death from COVID-19 were also absent in Hong Kong, where Beijing largely suppressed opposition voices when it imposed a sweeping national security law on the semi-autonomous city in 2020. Unlike other countries, China has not erected memorials to those who lost their lives during the pandemic.
Little is known about the identity of the first victim of Covid-19, except that he was a frequent visitor to the seafood market in Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have circulated during the initial outbreak.
Western governments later criticized China for allegedly covering up early transmission of the virus and erasing evidence of its origins, although Beijing vehemently insisted it had acted decisively and with full transparency.
China has officially reported nearly 100 million cases of Covid-19 and 122,000 deaths to date, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), although the public will likely never know the true number. In 2023, Beijing declared “victory” over Covid, calling the country’s response to the pandemic a “miracle in human history”.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
