French photographer Gilles Sabrié captured this dystopian scene as the world headed towards lockdown in February 2020.

On Saturday 25 January 2020, millions of Chinese people started celebrating the Lunar New Year. The country's megacities saw huge temporary migrations as people left to celebrate with friends and family in distant towns and cities, as they did every January.

That year, however, there was a dramatic difference. Many of the people who left to celebrate were unable to return for weeks or even months. A type of pneumonia that had appeared in the western Chinese city of Wuhan the previous December had quietly became a concern. By the time Chinese revellers boarded trains and planes home a month later it had become a crisis.

French photographer Gilles Sabrié was in Beijing at that very moment, as the seriousness of the Wuhan virus became more evident. "The photo editor at the New York Times had asked me to roam Beijing and take some pictures of the atmosphere. I just gotten back from holidays and I didn't know what to expect."

Wuhan was already in lockdown, though these measures hadn't yet been adopted by other Chinese cities. Even so, Sabrié found the city sombre and eerily quiet. "There were very, very few people anywhere. Most restaurants were closed. Everybody was worried that the disease would spread to Beijing.

"What made the situation probably more anxious is people didn't have much trust in what the authorities were saying. Initially, they had said there was no human-to-human transmission, then, just a few days later, they reverse and then go into full lockdown for Wuhan, a city of 10 million."

Sabrié says the Chinese authorities had stressed that there had been few deaths in Beijing, a city of 23 million people. "The question is, could we trust those figures? That was a big thing," Sabrié says. Beijing's citizens began to shy away from the routines of city life, encouraged by public health messages to limit the spread. "It was not a firm lockdown, like you had to stay home, but basically, you were encouraged to limit your movements," Sabrié says.

The result was an

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