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

On January 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 pandemic that has so far killed over seven million people and profoundly altered ways of life around the world, including in China.

Yesterday, 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 efforts to contain its spread had failed.

China was later criticised by Western governments for allegedly covering up the early transmission of the virus and effacing evidence of its origins, though Beijing has vehemently maintained it acted decisively and with full transparency.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), China has officially reported nearly 100 million COVID cases and 122,000 deaths to date, although the true number will likely never be known.

In 2023, Beijing declared a “decisive victory” over COVID, calling its response a “miracle in human history”.

This combination photo created on December 23, 2024 shows officials in protective suits checking on an elderly man wearing a facemask who collapsed and died on a street near a hospital in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, on January 30, 2020 (top) and a view outside the same location on December 21, 2024, ahead of the fifth anniversary of China confirming its first death from the novel coronavirus. (AFP)