(Photo : REUTERS/Stringer CHINA OUT.)
Passengers wearing face masks ride a ferry on Yangtze River after travel restrictions to leave Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province and China's epicentre of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, were lifted, April 8, 2020.
After the unprecedented restrictions on movement were lifted, tens if thousands of people are now set to leave the epicenter of COVID-19 to return to their jobs in other parts of the country after spending the last two months locked down in Wuhan.
Two weeks after a similar relaxation in the rest of Hubei Province with 60 million population about same size with Italy's, the lockdown in Wuhan was lifted. If people can show their given clean bill of health, they can leave the city as the city's transport services including taxis and ferries resuming their operations.
Despite the clearance in the restrictions, people will still need to present a QR code or paperwork stating that they are in good health before they can go out of residential compounds and use public transport or enter shops.
Wuhan native and Vice-president of furniture company Red Star Macalline, Tang Zhiyong shared that he was planning to head for Shanghai where the company is based for as a business manager he feels that he needs to work now for he had been trapped in Wuhan for more than two months.
Travellers are seen inside Hankou Railway Station after travel restrictions to leave Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province and China's epicentre of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, were lifted, April 8, 2020.
Tang also mentioned that despite being stuck in the city, his company continued paying his salary as the government has also announced that they will aide companies to keep their staff on their payroll during the lockdown.
State Council issued last month a directive aimed at protecting jobs as they promised to cut fees or subsidize businesses.
After China's decision to ban the entry of most foreign nationals, the official number of COVID-19 cases tallied remained low and it is where Wuhan experienced relaxation while the outbreak crawled in other countries.
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Most grocery stores and supermarkets in Wuhan have reopened making the traffic within the city more vibrant in the past two weeks.
On a Tuesday's report of the Wuhan municipal police, traffic levels in the city have reached a half mark of the traffic they have experienced in December, the month before the outbreak was identified.
Seventy-five road checkpoints set up across Wuhan will be removed and state-owned China Railway Corporation projected that about 55,000 passengers will leave the city on Wednesday and about 40% of them are bound for Pearl River Delta in Guangdong.
On the other hand, for others lockdown is not yet over, Xiao Fei, a PhD student living inside the Huangzhong University of Science and Technology is still not allowed to leave the premises of the campus and shared that there will be a very long time before life can return to normal for people in Wuhan can now leave the province and people from other provinces will be afraid of them and he expected that it will be lasting discrimination.
Despite the city's efforts in tracing asymptomatic patients, new cases in about 70 residential compounds have been recorded in the past three days but the Province Health Authorities cleared and classed more than 97 percent of the compounds within the city as virus-free and slowly ending the outbreak in the area.
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