A tale of two recoveries: uncovering the imbalance between state-driven production and private consumption in post-pandemic Wuhan, China

The world's first epicentre of Covid-19 that contained the virus early and recovered quickly, Wuhan, the capital city of China's Hubei province, offers a rare case for examining the effective but unbalanced role of the Chinese state in recovering a post-Covid city against a continued zero-Covid policy. Due to institutional inertia in policy-making, Wuhan has experienced a two-track recovery of (i) rapid GDP growth from infrastructure investment fuelled by government stimuli and large state-owned enterprises, and (ii) a weak recovery for small private businesses and grassroots consumption. Combining analyses of city-level data and survey/interview information, this paper examines the unbalanced role of the Chinese state in producing Wuhan's uneven two-track economic recovery and its implications for recalibrating the roles of the central versus local governments and empowering the latter to rebalance from production to consumption and to improve livelihood.

Single-cell landscape of immunological responses in COVID-19 patients (preprint)

In COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, the relationship between disease severity and the host immune response is not fully understood. Here we performed single-cell RNA sequencing in peripheral blood samples of five healthy donors and 13 COVID-19 patients including moderate, severe and convalescent cases. Through determining the transcriptional profiles of immune cells, coupled with assembled T cell receptor and B cell receptor sequences, we analyzed the functional properties of immune cells. Most cell types in COVID-19 patients showed a strong interferon-alpha response, and an overall acute inflammatory response. Moreover, intensive expansion of highly cytotoxic effector T cell subsets, such as CD4+ Effector-GNLY (Granulysin), CD8+ Effector-GNLY and NKT CD160, was associated with convalescence in moderate patients. In severe patients, the immune landscape featured a deranged interferon response, profound immune exhaustion with skewed T cell receptor repertoire and broad T cell expansion. These findings illustrate the dynamic nature of immune responses during the disease progression.