Wuhan goes wild: Thousands attend pool party in former COVID-19 epicentre

Thousands attended the Wuhan pool party at the weekend
Thousands attended the Wuhan pool party at the weekend Copyright AFP
Copyright AFP
By Euronews
Share this articleComments
Share this articleClose Button

Attendance was capped at 50% of normal capacity - but women got in half price.

ADVERTISEMENT

Just nine months ago, Wuhan was the Chinese city where the first known cases of COVID-19 were confirmed.

The city of 11 million people went into lockdown and the virus outbreak became a pandemic, spreading rapidly to almost every country of the world.

But pictures from Wuhan last weekend suggest many of its residents have now truly moved on.

Thousands of people wearing swimsuits crammed into the Wuhan Maya Beach Water Park for an electronic music festival.

It was a massive pool party, complete with a DJ on turntables, dancers wearing colourful rah-rah skirts and a pyrotechnics show.

There was little sign of social distancing and not a face mask in sight: many in the crowd floated on large rubber rings, while others waded chest-deep in the water.

Meanwhile, women were entitled to half-price admission.

AP/Chinatopix
The city of Wuhan, pictured here in January, was the first in the world to lock down because of COVID-19AP/Chinatopix

The water park reopened on June 25 and has recently attracted around 15,000 visitors at weekends, which its owners said was about half its usual numbers.

But it was a vastly different image from the beginning of this year, when the central Chinese city resembled a deserted ghost town as it implemented the world's first COVID-19 lockdown.

Wuhan's lockdown began to ease in March and was officially lifted on April 8.

Neither the city nor Hubei province have reported locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 for three months, and officials declared the city free of the virus after testing 10 million of the city's residents in June.

There have been over 89,400 cases of coronavirus reported in China with 4,703 deaths.

Share this articleComments

You might also like

Airbnb bans house parties in its listings across the globe in response to COVID-19

Could the COVID-19 pandemic have been avoided if China were a democracy?

Scotland's Nicola Sturgeon says she felt 'overwhelmed' by COVID pandemic during testimony