In a Chinese city under lockdown, hope arrives by motorbike

The delivery driver did not want to go upstairs.

The driver, Zhang Sai, hovered outside an apartment building in Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak. He had been ordered not to take food to customers’ doors in order to minimize the risk of infection.

But the woman on the phone was pleading, he recalled. The food was for her mother, who couldn’t go down to meet him.

Zhang relented. He would drop off the order and sprint away. As he placed the bag on the floor, Zhang said, the door opened. Startled, he rushed away. Without thinking, he said, he jabbed the elevator button with his finger, touching a surface he feared could transmit the virus.

That was how Zhang, 32, found himself speeding back to his delivery station with one finger held aloft, careful not to touch the rest of his hand — a quarantine in miniature.

“I was very scared,” he recalled. “Because I ride a scooter, I felt the finger was like a flag.”

For many in China, delivery drivers like Zhang are the only connection to the outside world. Once a ubiquitous but invisible presence on the streets of nearly every Chinese city, the drivers are now being heralded as heroes.

Throughout China, at least 760 million people — almost a tenth of the world’s population — face some form of residential lockdown. The restrictions are particularly strict in Wuhan, where government efforts to contain the virus have barricaded most of the city’s 11 million residents in their homes.

Each household can send someone out for necessities just once every three days. Many residents do not venture outside at all, for fear of infection. Of the more than 2,200 deaths and nearly 75,000 infections linked to the new virus, the majority have been in Wuhan.

But people still have to...