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| Testers fully covered in PPE, doing covid tests in Shanghai. Image source. |
Post from last Saturday (March 12), about Shanghai's covid outbreak that began on March 1: On the Current Covid Outbreak in Shanghai
Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak
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All right, so. Updates since then:
On Monday morning (March 14) I contacted our ayi to ask her if she would be able to come to our home or if she was locked down. (In China, it's common for people in our economic class to hire an "ayi" which means a maid or nanny. We used to have a full-time ayi to take care of our son, but since he started going to daycare we changed to a part-time ayi who cleans and makes dinner.)
Ayi says, her apartment complex is locked down. For 14 days. So. OMG we have to clean our own home and cook our own food. And my son's daycare is closed (last Friday afternoon, the city of Shanghai announced that all schools will be closed because of the covid outbreak, and this includes Square Root's daycare). So Hendrix and I are trying to work from home while also taking care of Square Root and also cooking and doing housework.
Oh, yeah, because about the food deliveries: Monday I ordered some groceries, and they came 3 hours late. As in, I ordered around 8 am, it said it would arrive at 11:45, and then it arrived at 2:45. On Tuesday, the groceries arrived 2 and a half hours late. Good thing we have a lot of random extra food like eggs and frozen hash browns and whatever- we were able to cobble together a dinner after giving up on the grocery delivery. Anyway, yes the groceries did finally come and now we have plenty of food.
Also, the city of Shanghai posted on their WeChat on Tuesday to say, no, we are not shutting down the entire city. And yes, I do believe they will have this under control and it won't be necessary to shut down the entire city.
So. This morning (Wednesday, March 16). So I get up in the morning and look out the window, to see if people are going in and out the back door of our apartment complex. You know, to check if we are locked down or not. I saw a few people go to the back door, then turn around and walk away. Ohh, not a good sign. So I went outside to take the trash out, and after I had put the trash in the trash bins, I walked around to investigate what is happening.
Yes, indeed, the back door of the apartment complex has a lock on it.
So I go to the other door- the main gate of the apartment complex. I see a bunch of people standing around- random residents wearing masks, helpful volunteers wearing red vests, and several people wearing the whole white head-to-toe PPE-and-face-shield get-up, sitting at a table with an array of test tubes.
So yeah.
I talked to some of the red-vest people. Their vests have the words 志愿者, which means "volunteer." I think some of them are Communist Party members- because they're required to do this kind of volunteer stuff; it's not like political parties in the US where anyone can join just by checking a box. No, being a Communist Party member actually has some requirements and a bit of prestige associated with it. ANYWAY, probably not all the volunteers were Party members; I don't know. But yeah so I talked to these volunteers to ask what was going on.
They said our apartment complex is locked down, for 2 days, starting this morning at 6 am. They said everyone needs to get covid-tested. They said if you need to go to work, there is a form you can fill out to get out of lockdown. (And yes, I saw a bunch of people this morning filling out the form and therefore being allowed to leave.)
They also had an official notice paper about it. I took a picture of that. It says we all have to get tested twice- once today and once tomorrow.
See, what's happening is some "key areas" of the city are having all the apartment complexes do 48-hour lockdowns. Not because anyone in our apartment complex was found to have covid, but just because they are doing mass testing for this whole area. No, if someone was actually found to have covid, then it would be a 14-day lockdown (and I strongly suspect this is what happened in Ayi's apartment complex).
So, I try to get on the app for covid-testing ("Health Cloud"); the way it works is you have to register in the app, then you get a QR code, and when you go to get tested, they scan your QR code. But I couldn't get it to work. Kept getting "request timeout" errors. Because yeah, in the morning when everyone is finding out they're in lockdown, they are all trying to get on the "Health Cloud" app at the same time.
So I wasn't able to do a covid test right then. Decided to come back later when the app was working.
(Oh yeah also, about this app, it's a bit of a pain for non-Chinese citizens. Ha, a lot of apps which require you to verify your identity are a pain for non-Chinese citizens. It's like, oh, this app has my old passport number saved instead of my current passport number- is it possible to change that? No? I just have to create a new user which is actually literally myself but with the correct passport number? Also, do they want my name in all caps? Should I put a space between my first and middle names? If you guess wrong, it will tell you it can't verify your id and you just gotta guess again. Like how many permutations of your name can you imagine? Hopefully one of them is the one that this computer system has in mind! Best of luck!)
Anywayyyy so I go home. My husband and I try to work from home while Square Root watches "Magic School Bus" and/or puts every single toy he owns on our living room floor. Talking to my work colleagues, I find that several of them are also suddenly in lockdown today.
After lunch, we got "Health Cloud" to work, I took screenshots of the QR codes in case the app went down again, and we went out to get covid-tested.
So, I have been using the term "covid test" on my blog, but to be more specific, these are nucleic-acid tests. (核酸 in Chinese.) They were just doing it in the throat, not the nose, probably because nobody likes getting a long stick up their nose, and we are expecting the results to all be negative anyway, so no need to do the more intense nose covid test.
Also, here's a bit of an interesting fact: the testers were putting several people's throat swabs into the same test tube. This is because they are expecting them to all be negative, and they're testing tens of thousands of people every day. They can get all this mass testing done much faster if they put them together instead of one test tube per person. (And then if a tube turns out to be positive, then they just need to test those specific people individually.)
Anywayyyy so that's the situation. We got covid-tested- me, my husband, and my little toddler son. We'll have to do it again tomorrow. For us, it's not a problem being in lockdown, because we weren't going anywhere anyway.
Okay that's all for now, readers ~ I will give you more updates as they happen.
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A few other little notes:
In December 2021 I wrote a post called I Don't Know Anyone in China Who Has Had Covid. I guess I have a bit of an update: It is still true that I don't personally know anyone in China who has had covid, BUT just yesterday I saw someone in one of the WeChat groups (I am in a bunch of groups with hundreds of members) who has covid and is currently in one of the designated hospitals. They said they feel bad for the children there who are alone- because all the patients there are isolated, no one is allowed to visit, even children aren't allowed to see their parents. Even infants.
That's terrible. Overall I trust China's anti-covid strategy, but some of these details are not good.
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Some articles from Sixth Tone about the covid outbreak in Shanghai:
China Updates Quarantine Rules, Treatments for COVID-19 Patients (March 16) Seems like a lot of international people are taking this as a really positive sign, like the first step toward China opening up ... I don't know. Lots of people have said lots of things over the past 2 years about how China is totally going to open up soon. I'll believe it when I see it.
One Hundred Thousand Students Likely Locked Down in Shanghai (March 16)
COVID-19 Cases at a Shanghai Hospital Lead to Chaos, Lockdown (March 15) Oh this is not good.
Shanghai Slows Down to Curb COVID-19 Spread (March 14)
China Sees Over 1,000 COVID-19 Cases for First Time Since 2020 (March 11)
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Follow-up post: I'm Still in Lockdown
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