Latest for @Independent - After more than two months of enforced lockdown, residents in #Wuhan, where the #COVID19 outbreak originated, can finally leave the city. Here’s a peek into their lives under lockdown and how it might have changed them forever. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-china-stop-wuhan-lockdown-world-pandemic-end-over-a9453731.html

For some, it is a rollercoaster 75 days as their entire family were transferred between hospitals and witnessed all kinds of “exotic” experiences that they never thought would happen to them in their hometown.

“For Graham*, who along with his parents became infected not long after the city’s outbreak began, the experience has left him determined not just to get out of Hubei province, but to leave China altogether.”

“These makeshift hospitals were specifically built, at breakneck speed, to house coronavirus patients with mild symptoms. Graham describes how the facilities, staffed mostly by doctors trained in traditional Chinese medicine, encouraged treatments that “didn’t make any sense”.

“Patients were told to massage the area around their belly button clockwise throughout the day, as the doctor claimed this would help them “release the virus” out of their bodies.”

““When I asked one of the doctors what would happen if I massage my belly button counter-clockwise, he immediately said that’s the typical reasoning in western medicine,” says Graham.

Graham says doctors also taught patients how to “detox” by hitting their elbows and other body parts as hard as they could, for prolonged periods, “to cleanse the virus from their lungs.

So throughout the day I could hear the sound of patients hitting their elbows, and many of them had bruised elbows.”

“This pandemic made me realise how extreme the Chinese government can be when they try to take control over the society,” Graham says. Censorship, always a part of everyday life under the Communist Party, has become even more extreme.

“Over the last two months, what we can basically do is to praise the government’s efforts in containing the virus and receive relevant information that has already been heavily censored,” he says.