Just under a year ago, authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan announced a complete travel ban in a bid to contain a novel coronavirus outbreak that had, at that point, officially killed 17 people.The extreme lockdown that was rolled out across the country in the subsequent weeks was a harbinger of what the rest of 2020 would hold for many parts of the world.China’s economy was brought to its knees: factories stopped producing, restaurants stopped serving, internal borders were shut…

This post was originally published on South China Morning Post.