“TIME PASSES”
And on the popular Weibo platform, users who gravitated to the former account of Li Wenliang – the whistleblower doctor who was investigated by police for spreading early information about the virus – did not directly reference the anniversary.
“Dr. Li, another year has gone by,” read one comment on Saturday. “How quickly time passes.”
There was also little online commemoration in Hong Kong, where Beijing largely snuffed out opposition voices when it imposed a sweeping national security law on the semi-autonomous city in 2020.
Unlike other countries, China has not built major memorials to those who lost their lives during the pandemic.
Little is known about the identity of the first COVID-19 casualty except that he was a frequent visitor to a Wuhan seafood market where the virus is thought to have circulated during the initial outbreak.
Within days of his death, other countries reported their first cases of the disease, showing that official efforts to contain its spread had failed.
China was later criticised by Western governments for allegedly covering up the early transmission of the virus and effacing evidence of its origins, though Beijing has vehemently maintained it acted decisively and with full transparency.
According to the World Health Organization, China has officially reported nearly 100 million COVID-19 cases and 122,000 deaths to date, although the true number will likely never be known.
In 2023, Beijing declared a “decisive victory” over COVID-19, calling its response a “miracle in human history”.
