China's coronavirus lockdown strategy: brutal but effective

The world was astonished by the Wuhan quarantine but it seems to have worked

• Coronavirus - latest updates

When China announced it was shutting down Wuhan, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, in a bid to prevent further spread of the disease, the world was stunned and experts sceptical.

Beijing's decision was a vast experiment, epidemiologists warned, that might not work despite its huge human and economic cost. Quarantine had never been tried on such an enormous scale in the modern world.