China marks muted 5th anniversary of first COVID-19 death

BEIJING, China — The fifth anniversary of the first known death from COVID-19 passed seemingly unnoticed in China Saturday, with no official remembrances in a country where the pandemic is a taboo subject.

On Jan. 11, 2020, health officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan announced that a 61-year-old man had died from complications of pneumonia caused by a previously unknown virus.

The disclosure came after authorities had reported dozens of infections over several weeks by the pathogen later named SARS-CoV-2 and understood as the cause of Covid-19.

It went on to spark a global pandemic that has so far killed over seven million people and profoundly altered ways of life around the world, including in China.

On Saturday, however, there appeared to be no official memorials in Beijing's tightly controlled official media.

The ruling Communist Party kept a tight leash on public discussion throughout its zero-Covid policy, and has eschewed reflections on the hardline curbs since dramatically ditching them at the end of 2022.

On social media, too, many users seemed unaware of the anniversary.

A few videos circulating on Douyin -- the Chinese version of TikTok -- noted the date but repeated the official version of events.

And on the popular Weibo platform, users who gravitated to the former account of Li Wenliang -- the whistleblower doctor who was investigated by police for spreading early information about the virus -- did not directly reference the anniversary.

"Dr. Li, another year has gone by," read one comment on Saturday. "How quickly time passes."

There was also little online commemoration in Hong Kong, where Beijing largely snuffed out opposition voices when it imposed a sweeping national security law on the semi-autonomous city in 2020.

Unlike other countries, China has not built major memorials to those who lost their lives during the pandemic.

Little is known about the identity of the first Covid casualty except that he was a frequent visitor to a Wuhan seafood market where the virus is thought to have circulated during the initial outbreak.

Within days of his death, other countries reported their first cases of the disease, showing that official