At the start of the outbreak, foreign media and officials frequently criticized the Wuhan lockdown as draconian and excessive. On Friday, after China amended the city's death toll to 3,869 to account for previous inaccuracies, some foreign media and politicians interpreted the move as China under-reporting its real death count.

Zhou Weisheng, a professor with the College of Policy Science at Ritsumeikan University in Japan, said if China had not imposed the lockdown on Wuhan and some other cities, the number of infections might have been 10 times higher.

"Considering the lack of effective treatment methods for COVID-19, cutting off the source of infection by locking down Wuhan and some other cities as soon as possible was the right measure," he said.