{"id":3001,"date":"2026-08-10T09:20:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T09:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/?p=3001"},"modified":"2026-08-10T09:20:48","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T09:20:48","slug":"5-places-that-went-from-packed-to-empty-after-coronavirus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/2026\/08\/10\/5-places-that-went-from-packed-to-empty-after-coronavirus\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Places That Went From Packed to Empty After Coronavirus"},"content":{"rendered":"

In early 2020, something happened that would have seemed impossible just months earlier. Some of the busiest and most recognizable places on Earth suddenly became almost completely deserted. Tourist attractions lost their crowds. Famous squares stood empty. Streets normally filled with traffic had almost no cars. And while much of the world was shutting down, Wuhan was doing something completely different: rapidly constructing emergency hospitals to deal with the outbreak. Here are five striking before-and-after examples of how dramatically the pandemic changed the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1. Walt Disney World, Florida \u2014 From Thousands of Visitors to Almost Nobody<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Few places depend on crowds more than Disney World. Aerial photographs of Magic Kingdom taken shortly before its closure show visitors filling Main Street U.S.A., the plaza around Cinderella Castle and the park’s walkways. Then came March 2020. Walt Disney World closed on March 16 as the pandemic accelerated across the United States. Aerial footage taken that same day showed an almost surreal sight: the Magic Kingdom without its crowds. Main Street was empty, the usually packed plaza was deserted and attractions sat motionless. Disney World had gone from one of the world’s most recognizable symbols of mass tourism to something resembling a ghost town almost overnight.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2. Tiananmen Square, Beijing \u2014 An Iconic Square Without the Crowd<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Tiananmen Square is enormous, but it normally contains a steady stream of pedestrians and visitors. Satellite imagery makes the difference particularly striking. A Maxar image from February 21, 2019 shows people moving through the square and traffic along the surrounding roads. A comparable image taken on February 11, 2020, during China’s lockdown measures, shows the square almost completely empty. Photographs from Beijing during the same period tell the same story. In early March, the enormous square appeared almost deserted, with only a handful of people visible against its vast expanse. For a place designed to accommodate huge crowds, the emptiness was almost more striking than a crowd could have been.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

3. Wuhan, China \u2014 The One Place Where the Opposite Happened<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

While coronavirus was making public spaces around the world empty, Wuhan was experiencing the opposite kind of transformation. Satellite images captured the construction of Huoshenshan Hospital, one of the emergency facilities built in response to the outbreak. Before construction, the site was largely undeveloped. Then, in an astonishingly short period, the landscape was transformed into a huge complex of modular medical buildings. The Huoshenshan facility was constructed in roughly 10 days. Satellite imagery shows the site changing from largely empty land into a sprawling hospital complex. A second emergency hospital, Leishenshan, was also constructed during the outbreak. It’s probably the strongest “opposite” image for the article: while the rest of the world was disappearing from public spaces, Wuhan was building new ones for patients.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

4. Erbil, Iraq \u2014 A Market Without Its Shoppers<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The change wasn’t limited to the world’s most famous tourist destinations. In Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, normally busy markets and streets became remarkably quiet during the pandemic. The effect was especially noticeable around the Erbil Citadel and its surrounding markets. In April 2020, local reporting described streets that would normally be crowded with shoppers preparing for Ramadan as almost completely empty because of restrictions introduced to combat COVID-19. The image is particularly powerful because these aren’t purpose-built tourist attractions that simply closed their doors. They were ordinary parts of daily life \u2014 suddenly without the people who normally made them busy.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

5. Times Square, New York \u2014 The City That Never Sleeps… Went to Sleep<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And then there was Times Square. Normally, this is one of the most recognizable concentrations of people, advertisements, taxis and tourists on the planet. But in March 2020, the crowds virtually disappeared. On March 16, as New York introduced increasingly strict measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, Times Square was filmed with only a few pedestrians and vehicles visible. The enormous electronic billboards were still glowing. The buildings were still there. The streets were still there. But the people were gone. It created one of the defining visual images of the pandemic: perhaps the world’s most famous symbol of urban crowds suddenly looking strangely abandoned.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early 2020, something happened that would have seemed impossible just months earlier. Some of the busiest and most recognizable places on Earth suddenly became almost completely deserted. Tourist attractions…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exclusives","category-photo-vault","category-weird-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3008,"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001\/revisions\/3008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gleamgrid.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}