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| Box containing 1 dose of the Sinopharm covid-19 vaccine. Yeah mine looked like this. Image source. |
Well hooray everyone, I got my booster shot.
Last year I got the 2 doses of Sinopharm's covid-19 vaccine, and now I've just gotten the 3rd shot, the booster shot. Booster shots for Chinese citizens have been available for a while now, but the computer system for international people in Shanghai to sign up for the booster shot only became available at the end of January. Chinese citizens were able to get booster shots before that. It's not a big deal, though, that citizens and immigrants are under different systems, because nobody here has covid, there is not really any risk, so it's not like it's super super urgent for me to get the booster shot.
Also, in China there is a covid vaccine for kids ages 3-11. It became available for international kids in Shanghai at the end of January, and for Chinese kids a bit before that. In the US, the covid vaccines start at age 5. I have been watching the news from the US to see the process of getting vaccines approved for kids younger than 5. Really hoping to see some good news on that soon, because I know people there who have kids younger than 5.
Anyway... yeah yay I got the booster. I am way less enthusiastic about this than about my first Sinopharm vaccine, though. Back then, I had a lot more hope, like "we need to all get vaccinated and then the pandemic will be over and I can go see my family." But now... getting the booster doesn't really change anything for me. I don't feel like China is any closer to opening the borders.
Maybe I should have realized, when China was doing their vaccine rollout last year, nobody was talking about "let's all get vaccinated and then the pandemic will be over and we'll be back to normal, thank goodness finally." Yes, there was a huge push to get people vaccinated- PSAs posted everywhere, people coming door-to-door to let you know where the vaccination sites were, rumors about how certain vaccination sites were giving out free stuff. And yet, the rest of the strategy for controlling the pandemic remained the same. Wearing masks, quarantining an entire apartment complex if 1 covid case was discovered there, travel restrictions, being required to show a green health code on your phone when you entered the mall- all of that stayed the same. There was no "oh if you're vaccinated then you don't have to follow these rules any more." There was no "we can stop doing all these things because enough people are vaccinated."
I mean, yeah it definitely made a difference that people were vaccinated- it has decreased the rate that the virus is able to spread, so the "outbreaks" are smaller. And it means that most of the covid-positive people in China have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic. But from my perspective, as someone who has never gotten anywhere near anyone who actually had covid because everyone is following a ton of rules about it- yeah, that didn't change when we all got vaccinated.
I don't know what it's going to take for China to open the border, then.
And I should clarify what I mean by "open the border"- yes, people do enter China every day. There are flights. It's not like literally nobody can enter China. But when you enter China, you are required to quarantine for 14 or 21 days. Like, a real quarantine, a "you stay in your hotel room and only open the door when they drop off your food and when they come to covid-test you." I know people who have done this.
And it's not just the quarantine, it's the flight cancellations- a lot of people said that when they were trying to book flights into China, their flights got cancelled several times before they were able to successfully get on a plane. (And I looked at the prices the other day- these US-China flights are like, $6000 or $10,000, one way. In the Before Times, I used to pay maybe $1200 round-trip, for a China-US trip.)
So, like, yeah, that's why I haven't seen my family in 2 years. It's easy to leave China, it's hard to come back. Which, it turns out, is true regardless of how vaccinated China's population is. So. Hard to get too excited about the booster shot.
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