A COVID-19 descriptive study of life after lockdown in Wuhan, China

Abstract

On April 8th, 2020, the Chinese government lifted the lockdown and opened up public transportation in Wuhan, China, the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. After 76 days in lockdown, Wuhan residents were allowed to travel outside of the city and go back to work. Yet, given that there is still no vaccine for the virus, this leaves many doubting whether life will indeed go back to normal. The aim of this research was to track longitudinal changes in motivation for self-isolating, life structured, indicators of well-being and mental health after lockdown was lifted. We have recruited 462 participants in Wuhan, China, prior to lockdown lift between the 3rd and 7th of April, 2020 (Time 1), and have followed up with 292 returning participants between 18th and 22nd of April, 2020 (Time 2), 284 between 6th and 10th of May, 2020 (Time 3), and 279 between 25th and 29th of May, 2020 (Time 4). This 4-wave study used latent growth models to examine how Wuhan residents’ psychological experiences change (if at all) within the first two months after lockdown was lifted. The Stage 1 manuscript associated with this submission received in-principle acceptance (IPA) on 2 June 2020. Following IPA, the accepted Stage 1 version of the manuscript was preregistered on the OSF at https://osf.io/g2t3b. This preregistration was performed prior to data analysis. Generally, our study found that: 1) a majority of people still continue to value self-isolation after lockdown was lifted; 2) by the end of lockdown, people perceived gradual return to normalcy and restored structure of everyday life; 3) the psychological well-being slightly improved after lockdown was lifted; 4) people who utilized problem-solving and help-seeking as coping strategies during lockdown had better well-being and mental health by the end of the lockdown; 5) those who experienced more disruptions in daily life during lockdown would display more indicators of psychological ill-being by the end of the lockdown.

Willingness of The COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake: A Cross-Sectional Study of Community Residents in China

“…Public concerns about vaccine safety are often reported as a major obstacle to vaccination decisions, especially for new vaccines. Our study con rmed the positive role of belief in safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine and the constant attention to the development of the COVID-19 vaccine in accepting COVID-19 vaccination, which was consistent with previous studies [9,11]. Our study found that residents who often live in the town were more willing to vaccination than those who live in the village.…”

“…Understanding residents' willingness to accept the COVID-19 vaccine and its main related factors may enable policy makers to take measures for vaccination coverage improvement. Five surveys had been conducted in China [8,9,10,11,12], four of them were in the research and development stage of the COVID-19 vaccine, while the other one focused on young adults preference for COVID-19 vaccines. The epidemic situation in China has been basically controlled and the developed vaccine is on the market now.…”

Mental health status of Italian elderly subjects during and after quarantine for the COVID‐19 pandemic: a cross‐sectional and longitudinal study

“…Further, some studies investigating the psychological consequences of the COVID‐19 pandemic and self‐isolation measures through follow‐up methodologies have broadly explored individuals' mental health status during the early phase and the peak of the COVID‐19 outbreak or at the start and the end of the lockdown. Otherwise, Zhou et al 18 . recruited participants from Wuhan for surveys before and after the lockdown was lifted revealing a slight improvement of individuals' mental health after the end of the lockdown.…”

Who Will Survive and Revive Undergoing the Epidemic

“…However, the city lockdown policy alone with inner-city lockdown orders for public transportation also brought great impact onto local POIs, which is shown in Fig 1 . As the release of the community lockdown policy on February 11, POI visit reached the lowest level. After a 76-day lockdown, Wuhan reopened on April 8 [40], when the POI visit slowly recovers.…”

“…For quantitative analyses based on human mobility, there are two major types: one for intra-city analyses, another for inter-city analyses. Google Community Mobility Reports [1], Apple Mobility Trends Reports [2] and our work belong to the intra-city analyses, while Yuan et al [37] and Zhou et al [40] belong to the inter-city analyses. Intra-city analyses focus on human mobility within the same city, where microscopic data (such as POI check-ins) are needed to provide understanding about fine-grained social-economic behaviors of citizens.…”