When the coronavirus lockdown first began last January in Wuhan, Jimmy Xiao was one of the Chinese city’s many residents who tried to escape.
“I thought you could just get in a car and head to another city in Hubei province and then buy a train ticket to Guangzhou, but it turned out that the whole province had been locked down, so I couldn’t do anything,” he told SBS News.
Mr Xiao originally comes from Guangzhou in southern China, but lived in Perth for 14 years and became an Australian citizen.
He moved to Wuhan two years ago with his wife, who is a native of the sprawling central Chinese city, and he works there as an investment consultant.
In February, when Australia began to evacuate its citizens on flights out of what was ground zero for China’s coronavirus outbreak, Mr Xiao was faced with a difficult decision.
His wife is neither an Australian national nor a permanent resident, so Mr Xiao decided to keep the family together.
"Even if I could bring my wife, it's still very difficult for her to separate from her family and my family from Guangdong as well," he said.
Wuhan faced some of the strictest lockdown measures out of anywhere in the world. The city, which was the original coronavirus epicentre in China, accounted for well over half of the country’s officially recorded cases of infections, and the vast majority of its 4,500 odd deaths.
But despite having to endure a gruelling 76-day lockdown, Jimmy came through the past year relatively unscathed.
While he knows of people who were seriously ill, he said none of his or his wife’s family members or close friends got infected.
Today, life in Wuhan has by and large returned to normal. Masks are not mandatory in most places and there are no restrictions on gatherings. According to official Chinese data, there have been no active cases in Hubei province since the end of March.
At the Hanzheng Street Wholesale Market, trade activity is once again bustling at the stores selling textiles and garments.
Hundreds of deliverymen race daily through the alleys that splinter from the market, packed with goods on electric scooters as if to make up for lost time.
One trader told SBS News, business was still a little way off what it used to be, but noted many people across the country had come to support Wuhan after what it has been through.
The overall health of the Chinese economy is in a far better place than the rest of the world, after coming through the worst of the coronavirus crisis.
The Hanzheng Street Wholesale Market. Source: Supplied
The IMF predicts China's GDP will expand by 1.9 per cent in 2020, which would make it the only country in the world to experience growth in the last year.
Many others are relying on the rollout of vaccines to defeat the pandemic, but there is still uncertainty over whether the supply will be sufficient, and how long immunity will last – none of the candidates have had the chance to be tested for their efficacy over a period of more than just a few months.
One other key piece of information that could help prevent future, similar pandemics, remains unanswered – where did the virus come from in the first place?
At a World Health Assembly conducted via video link in May, President Xi Jinping endorsed an investigation into what unfolded in Wuhan a year ago, but to date, there has still been no independent probe of the disease from China's outbreak epicentre.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials have stepped up a campaign to suggest the virus originated from elsewhere. One theory they are pushing is that the virus may have broke out in Wuhan via cold-chain food imports.
Doctor Sridhar Siddharth from The University of Hong Kong’s Department of Microbiology said that idea is "theoretically possible".
"We know that the SARS-Coronavirus 2 which causes COVID-19 can actually retain its viability for long periods of time in environmental and experimental settings," he told SBS News.
The World Health Organisation is to assess the research already conducted by Chinese authorities.
Australian microbiologist Professor Dominic Dwyer will be part of a 10-man team that is slated to go.
"I think there's no doubt that the whole outbreak got going in Wuhan… once it got into the wild animal market, once it got into the hospital system, once it got into the community," he told SBS News. "How the virus got into Wuhan is unknown."
With China delivering an economic onslaught against Australia, ranging from sanctions to tariffs on goods like wine, beef and barley, relations between the two have hit an all-time low.
Regardless of the outcome of any probe, it is difficult to see how things can get back on track any time soon.
Patrick Fok is a freelance journalist based in Beijing.
