On the day the lockdown restrictions have been finally lifted in the city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, a viral video has started circulating on social media, sparking concerns that China might be heading towards a second outbreak. No new Covid-19 cases have been reported from Wuhan.
Infected people collapsing on Wuhan streets
While the easing of restrictions has been a relief for many 77 days after the city was cut off from the rest of the world, human rights activist Jennifer Zeng took to Twitter to share a video of a man who appears to have collapsed on the street in Wuhan on the first day of the city's re-opening.
"On April 8, the first day of the reopening of the city of Wuhan, someone suddenly fell on the street," she captioned the video.
The clip shows the man lying unconscious on the street in front of a Huawei retail store before medical professionals and law enforcement arrive at the scene donning protective gear, as Zeng pointed out in a follow-up tweet.
While Zeng did not reveal where exactly the incident took place, other social media users were able to confirm the location where the individual collapsed as Wuhan Digital Port, an electronics store on Dazhi Road.
In a separate video that has gone viral, another man seems to have collapsed outside the railway station in Wuhan. A Twitter user shared the footage of the man lying face-first on the ground. "Someone fell to the ground at Wuhan Station, At least three cases are currently publicly known," the user wrote.
Fears over second outbreak
In January, similar footage of infected men and women dropping on the streets "like flies" had emerged out of Wuhan, before the deadly COVID-19 virus spread rampantly around the world and evolved into a global pandemic that has infected more than 1,480,000 people and claimed over 88,500 lives.
The Wuhan lockdown restrictions were lifted despite warning from epidemiologists and experts that it is not the time to completely lower the guard and ease full-scale restrictions, considering the looming threat of asymptomatic patients and a possible rebound in infections that put China and the rest of the world at risk of a second large-scale outbreak.
