DIRT DEATH AND DISEASE?
The truth about China’s wet markets
Amesh plastic bag pulsates on the slick tiled floor. Inside, a mound of bullfrogs waits, motionless apart from the darting of their eyes and the bulging of their throats. Above them, tiny crabs clamber over one another in a polystyrene tub, while eels flip in a bucket and a river fish is stunned, gutted and descaled on a chopping board stained red with guts. Today, these are the only live animals available for sale in the newly reopened wet markets of Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province – but the city’s shopping scene wasn’t always so tame.
Across town is the now-infamous Huanan Seafood Market, suspected to be the first epicentre of the deadly COVID-19 outbreak. It’s swept across the world and taken hundreds of thousands of lives since Wuhan health officials issued an alert of a new virus on December 31, 2019. While most of the market was indeed dedicated to fish, shoppers could find live porcupines, bats, snakes and more in tucked-away corners, ready to be slaughtered onsite.
As the city of 11 million slowly gets back to life following its official reopening on April 8 – after 76 days in lockdown – old men recline on park benches, taking in the air between puffs of their cigarettes,
