The human cost of sealing off a province of tens of millions of people for two months may not become clear for months or even years. While experts have praised China’s stringent lockdowns for containing the virus, the measures also came at a great price to people’s livelihoods and personal liberties.

In a sign of how the outbreak — and the government’s early attempts to conceal it — has eroded public trust, the apparent absence of new infections in Wuhan was not met with universal celebration. Instead, many worried that the government had failed to disclose or discover a much larger number of infections than the 81,171 cases to date.

While China on Thursday reported zero new locally transmitted infections for the first time, users on Chinese social media the next day circulated photographs of notices from certain Wuhan neighborhoods which appeared to announce newly detected cases.

The outcry and confusion were such that the Wuhan government released a statement on its official social media account on Sunday to rebut the assertions that the authorities were hiding new cases. Some of the cases cited in the photos had already been counted and reported earlier, the government said. Another patient who had tested positive was asymptomatic, and so would be monitored but not count as a confirmed case until he showed symptoms, the statement said.

Chinese officials count only patients with both symptoms and a positive test in their official tally of confirmed cases. The approach is at odds with the World Health Organization’s guidance that all people who test positive should be considered confirmed cases regardless of whether they show symptoms.