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| Grocery store which has a garage-door-like door, which is half open so customers can't go in, though the store has reopened. Also you can see a location code (QR code) posted on the door. Image source. |
Posts about the covid outbreak in Shanghai, China:
Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak
Lockdown Diaries: I Went Out! (May 29)
Lockdown Diaries: We Are Allowed Out! (a little bit) (May 26)
Lockdown Diaries: Slowly Getting Better (maybe) (May 21)
Lockdown Diaries: June 1 Target for "Back to Normal" (yeah not gonna happen) (May 17)
Lockdown Diaries: Restrictions on Chinese Citizens Leaving China (May 13)
Lockdown Diaries: Taking a Whole Building to Quarantine (May 10)
Lockdown Diaries: More and More People Get to Go Out (a little bit) (May 7)
Lockdown Diaries: Some People Can Go to the Grocery Store (May 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Exciting New Definition of "Society" (May 1)
Lockdown Diaries: This is a Human-Made Disaster (April 26)
Lockdown Diaries: More of the Same (April 22)
Lockdown Diaries: 3 Covid Deaths Reported in Shanghai (April 18)
Lockdown Diaries: Dystopian Madness (April 15)
Lockdown Diaries: Part of Shanghai is Out of Lockdown (April 12)
Lockdown Diaries: I am Okay, Shanghai is Not (April 9)
Lockdown Diaries: Dressing Up, Free Medicine, Free Rice (April 6)
Lockdown Diaries: Antigen Self-Tests, and Children with Covid (April 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Covid Case in Our Complex, and Free Veggies from the Government (March 31)
Now All of Pudong (East Shanghai) is in Lockdown (March 28)
I'm in Lockdown Again (March 25)
I'm Still in Lockdown (March 19)
I'm in Lockdown (March 16)
On the Current Covid Outbreak in Shanghai (March 12)
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Here's the updated timeline:
March 16-21: First lockdown. 6 days.
March 23 - May 31: Second lockdown. 69 days and DONE!
Mass testing:
- Nucleic acid tests (conducted by baymax, ie, the workers in white hazmat suits): 33 times (March 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 26, 28, 30, April 4, 6, 9, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, May 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 27)
- Antigen self-tests: 34 times (April 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13 [twice], 15, 16, 22, 23, 25, 28 [twice], 30, May 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31)
(The above info is specific to our apartment complex. Other apartment complexes in Shanghai will have a similar situation but not exactly the same.)
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We are free!
Well our apartment complex said our lockdown would end on June 1, but then today (May 31) they said whatever, we can go out anyway, our lockdown is done now. (No passes needed, no questions asked, no restrictions on time.)
YESSSS!
And the city of Shanghai announced that lockdown for all of Shanghai ends on June 1. (With the exception of "medium risk" and "high risk" areas- this means apartment complexes that have had covid cases within the past 14 days, or something along those lines, I am not sure of the exact definition. So lockdown is over for something like 96% of the residents of Shanghai.)
HOORAY!
The mood here is very happy. We heard music outside this afternoon, some patriotic songs, someone is having an outdoor party. In our apartment building group chat, the volunteers were posting "Shanghai has successfully controlled the pandemic! Thank you everyone for your support!" and then everyone is replying to thank the volunteers for their hard work. I saw videos on WeChat of people out and about on the streets, and videos of fireworks.
All subways will be running again starting June 1. Businesses are supposed to all be reopening- we'll see.
HR from my job posted a message that said we are allowed to go back to our office building, but they don't really recommend that we go there yet. Also, for now the number of people in the office building is limited to 20% capacity, so if we need to go we have to sign up first.
Schools are not reopening yet. The city of Shanghai posted a plan about high schools and middle schools opening first, then elementary schools, then kindergartens way at the end of June (kindergarten in China is 3 years long, starting at age 3- so it's a separate thing from elementary school). Our son is too young for kindergarten; he goes to a private daycare. No word yet on when daycare will be reopening.
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Nucleic acid test stations
City sets up 15,000 test sites to prevent COVID resurgence (May 30)
So, now that everyone is required to have a negative nucleic acid test within the past 72 hours in order to enter public places, the city of Shanghai has set up all these new testing booths. There is one in our apartment complex. So this morning (May 31) even though it wasn't required, we went and got tested, so that if/when we go out tomorrow, we'll have the negative test result we need.
According to the SHINE article at that link, "All PCR tests in Shanghai are free through June 30. The cost of a single tube PCR test will be cut to 16 yuan (US$2.40) per person and a mixed test to 5 yuan." (PCR = polymerase chain reaction, this is another name for the nucleic acid testing) So, it's free!
These new testing booths, they're kind of hilarious- they have 2 holes that the tester is supposed to stick their arms out of, in order to poke the swab into your throat. (Today at the one in our complex, the tester wasn't actually inside the booth, though- they set up a separate table next to it.)
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| A person gets tested at a nucleic acid testing booth in Shanghai. Image source. |
And some of the booths actually have gloves built into the booth itself, as if it's for astronauts studying moon rocks and they can't come in contact with anything in the moon rock containment area at all. And I have seen some videos at night, when no one is there, it's dark, and there's just these spooky gloves just hanging there, blowing slightly in the wind. Hilarious.
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| Image source. |
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Moving on from lockdown?
Well, now that lockdown is over, how do we summarize it? What are the long-term effects? What have we learned?
It's definitely too early to say, but here are some ideas:
I've been thinking about how easy it is, in non-lockdown times, to just buy whatever I want. Just buy something online, and we get it delivered in a matter of days. Buy food from a restaurant, and it comes in less than an hour. But our ancestors 200 years ago couldn't do anything like that.
And during lockdown, when we didn't have many choices for food, when the vegetables were all in giant mystery bags which contained way too many leafy ones... like, we can't choose what we want, these are the vegetables that we have, so this is what we're eating. But for most of human history, that's how it was.
We ran out of Cheerios pretty early in the lockdown. But... at the same time, isn't it amazing that in China, I was able to reliably get Cheerios at all, before? Even when I first moved to China in 2013, I rarely found Cheerios for sale anywhere. But now with online shopping apps like Taobao and Jingdong, you can get whatever you want. Whatever imported food you want. It might be kind of expensive, but you can get it.
And I think for me, the biggest long-term effect is that now we will keep more non-perishable food in our home.
But really, we're lucky. My husband and son and I have been in a much better situation than other people during this lockdown. We continue getting paid like normal. We never ran out of food. We have a good apartment management committee, who didn't force any senseless rules on us. (I have heard many stories of people not being allowed to get food delivered, because their apartment management said so. Ridiculous.) We haven't been working all day in anti-pandemic roles like community volunteers and testers and nurses and ambulance drivers. We never got covid. We haven't had any medical emergencies. I've heard about delivery drivers who had to sleep on the streets, grocery store workers who had to sleep at their stores, nurses wearing the whole baymax outfit, not allowed to eat or drink at all for most of the day, truck drivers from out of town who got stuck in Shanghai and had to live in their trucks for weeks. I've heard of people whose pets ran away, and there's nothing you can do, you aren't allowed to go out and look for them.
And this has definitely affected people's trust in the government. We've seen lots of bad things, like covid-positive people being sent to makeshift hospitals with horrible conditions. And we've seen how it gets censored from social media.
I guess we can trust that they can get us back to zero-covid, but for other things, like caring about people's needs, treating people humanely, no. (I saw someone on WeChat posted "They don't care what you die of, as long as it's not covid.")
And everyone knows that the city of Shanghai did a bad job of this. It's not just like "this is how it is in China"- it's more complicated than that.
And now we can say we've gotten through it, more or less, but wow it was really bleak for a while there. It was bad.
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I'll post more updates as things continue to happen, but I won't have to call them "Lockdown Diaries" any more. ^_^
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Links
Sixth Tone
Shanghai Reopening Diary (May 31, continues to be updated)
Some Shanghai Residents Worry About ‘Post-Lockdown Social Anxiety’ (May 31)
Snapshots of Shanghai, In Between Lockdown and Reopening (May 30) Very good photos here.
SHINE
When the Shanghai COVID-19 resurgence started (May 31) This timeline gives a good overall sense of what happened, and the article also includes useful graphs. But it's from SHINE, a propaganda rag, so they failed to mention all the ****ed up things that happened.
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