COVID-19: Wuhan holds mask-free graduation ceremony one year after virus outbreak in city

Over 11,000 students gathered in Wuhan, China, on June 13 for a massive graduation ceremony more than a year after the city was battered by the first global outbreak of COVID-19. According to South China Morning Post, during the graduation ceremony at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan, students in navy gowns sat in crowded rows, without social distancing or face masks. They reportedly sat beneath the sign that read, “Welcoming the graduates of 2020 back home. We wish you all a great future”. 

Quoting a line of ancient Chinese poetry, a banner even offered students advice for the future: "The ocean is boundless for leaping fish”. On Sunday, more than 2,200 people were graduates who could not attend their graduation last year due to tight virus restrictions. It worth mentioning that the capital of central China’s Hubei province was the epicentre of the global COVID-19 outbreak over a year ago and restrictions were only lifted after a 76-day lockdown in April 2020. 

Last year, the city held limited graduation ceremonies, with Wuhan University hosting mostly online events. Since then, China has largely contained the outbreak while keeping precautions high, including tight border controls, quarantine, mandatory online “health codes” and varying restrictions on domestic travel. According to reports, on Tuesday China registered only 20 new cases, including 18 imported from overseas and two in a local outbreak in southern Guangdong province. There have been 4,636 deaths officially reported, the majority in Wuhan. 

COVID-19 origin debate 

Meanwhile, there has been mounting controversy over how the virus first emerged in humans - whether through contact with animals at a wet market in Wuhan or leakage from The Wuhan Institute of Virology - as some have suggested. It is worth mentioning that WHO and Chinese experts issued the first report in March that laid out four hypotheses about how the pandemic emerged. The joint team said the most likely scenario was that the coronavirus jumped into people from bats via an intermediary animal, and the prospect that it erupted from a laboratory was deemed extremely unlikely. However, another report issued on March 20 claimed that a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was an "extremely unlikely" scenario. 

Interestingly, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus raised concerns about data being withheld from the team and said that the lab leak theory required "further investigation". As questions continue to be raised over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US and Britain have also demanded the WHO to take a deeper look into the possible origins of COVID-19, including a new visit to China where the first human infections were detected. The demand to probe COVID-19 origin intensified after an undisclosed and controversial Wall Street report propelled conspiracies claiming three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sought hospital care after they fell sick in November 2019.

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