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| A resident receives a delivery over the gate of a locked-down area. Image source. |
Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak
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Ah. Well. Remember last week when I posted about how Shanghai is totally at zero covid, and zero covid works, and everything is great?
This week is different. This week, more covid cases and lockdowns and mandatory testing.
Stats:
(I'm only posting the stats for local covid cases, not imported, as I explained last time.)
July 1: 0 locally transmitted covid cases
July 2: 2
July 3: 3
July 4: 8
July 5: 24
July 6: 54
July 7: 45
July 8: 59
Does this look kinda like exponential growth, which is a bit worrisome?
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Daycare is open, and I am back to work in the office
But first, some good news. My son's daycare reopened on July 4. It had been closed since mid-March; 3 and a half months.
Hooray! Finally I can send him to daycare so I can quit working from home, and I can go to the office and actually see people and be able to focus on work.
Little Square Root has been saying he doesn't want to go to daycare. He cried on Monday when my husband dropped him off there. But he'll be fine. He's slowly getting used to it. Before the lockdown, he was very happy at this daycare.
So this week, I've been at the office, Monday to Friday. I gotta say, it's really great getting work done without a small child always asking you for things.
I have been bringing my work computer home with me every night, though, because now we know how fast the situation can change. Every single day, you know there's a possibility that you won't be allowed to come to the office the next day.
At my job, nobody wears masks in the office. I also did not wear a mask Monday to Thursday, but I wore it on Friday because things seemed to be getting worse in Shanghai- we'll get to that later in this post.
And also, last weekend (July 3) I went to a party with about 15 people, and we didn't wear masks. Because, as I said last week, Shanghai is at zero covid, so it's fine! It's safe! We are all tired of wearing masks!
On the subway, everyone wears masks. It seems that the psychology is, when you're around strangers, you wear a mask, and when you're with people you know, you don't wear it. Which is not really logical, but that seems to be the pattern I see.
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July 5
So when I was at the office on Tuesday, July 5, several of my coworkers got phone calls or texts from their apartment complexes, informing them that they were required to get covid-tested that day. Our apartment complex didn't require it, though.
Also, on July 5, a lot of companies were notifying their employees that on July 6, they would be required to have a negative nucleic acid result from the past 24 hours in order to enter the company. 24 hours. The normal policy, for the past month or so, is 72 hours. My husband was notified by his job that he would be required to have this too, so he got tested at the testing location in our complex when he came home from work (July 5).
The office building where I work said they hadn't changed their policy- it was still 72 hours. I had been tested on July 4 and was planning to get tested again on July 6- this is the routine I have for myself; in order to guarantee that I always have the valid 72-hour result, and accounting for delays between when you get tested and when you get your result, I have decided to get tested every 2 days. (It's free.)
So no one was requiring me to get tested on July 5, but I went out and did it that night anyway, just in case the policy suddenly changed and I would need a 24-hour result on July 6. I had to wait in a long line. (The policy at my office building didn't end up changing though- still 72 hours rather than 24. So it would also have been fine if I hadn't gotten tested on July 5.)
Most parts of Shanghai to undergo urgent PCR screening (July 5)
So yeah, on July 5, people were all rushing out to wait in line and get tested, but we didn't really know why. We assumed that there had been a new bunch of covid cases discovered, and they were testing everyone because they were worried that it had already spread- but there were no details yet.
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July 6
Anyway, on July 6 we read the details:
Super spreader KTVs spawn dozens of COVID-19 risk areas in Shanghai (July 6) "Shanghai designated 26 high- and medium-risk areas of COVID-19 on Wednesday after detecting a host of new infections linked to a KTV and a teahouse, which are under investigation for alleged illegal business operations."
KTV means a karaoke place. I love going to KTV in China- you go with your friends and rent a small room, and you're all in there singing and drinking and eating snacks, putting your mouth all over the microphone shared by everyone, definitely not wearing masks. Yeah, definitely seems like the kind of business that would be last on the list of places that are allowed to reopen after a covid outbreak.
It's been reported that the KTV's in this outbreak have not been following all the rules about checking everyone's 72-hour negative result and making everyone scan the location code.
And, yeah, a lot of places I have been recently have not been strict about checking that everyone who enters has the 72-hour negative result and making us scan the location code. Usually, there's an employee standing at the door, and all the customers kinda vaguely point their phone screen (which shows their green health code, the status of their most recent nucleic acid test, and displays the name of the location if they scanned the location code correctly) in this employee's line of sight. But the employee isn't really looking carefully at each person's phone to make sure it's all there. I am sure they can tell if the color is green or not, but beyond that, they're not really close enough to see any of the other details.
(The job is boring as hell; it's not that surprising that they aren't motivated to do a good job of it...)
So yeah, it does not surprise me that a place with a covid outbreak wasn't checking closely enough. Because TONS of places I have been to don't check closely enough. The places with the outbreak are definitely getting in legal trouble because of it though.
KTV, tea house licenses revoked over COVID-19 cases (July 6)
On July 6, our building volunteers posted a message in the group chat that said everyone in our apartment complex is required to get tested that night. Doctors would come from 6 pm to 9 pm to test us all, and we would get called in sequence according to what building we lived in, just like we were during the lockdown.
Okay, lol, that's a bit ridiculous, because it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday. People are at work. They're not going to magically be at home when their building number gets called at 6 or 7 or whenever.
Anyway, people in the group chat started posting "I already got tested today, do I still have to do it?" and the answer was no, if you already got tested that day, then you don't have to do it. And honestly it looked pretty disorganized to me- the volunteers asked that if you already got tested, you send your name in the group chat, so they can keep track, but I think it would be easy for someone to just not get tested, and nobody would even know. They said it's mandatory, but I didn't see any mechanism for making sure everyone actually does it.
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July 7
On Thursday, July 7, my husband found out that a covid-positive person had visited the office building where he works, so the building would be closed. Everyone would have to work from home on July 8.
He didn't really get any details beyond that- like, they were not told when exactly the covid-positive person was there, or for how long. (Though we do know that they were not at the company where my husband works- they were somewhere else in the same building.) But fortunately for my husband, it just means he has to work from home, and it doesn't cause him any trouble beyond that- for example, his health code is still green, he is not required to quarantine, and he is not labelled as a "close contact" or "secondary close contact" or anything like that. So that's good.
On July 7 and 8, I started seeing posts in some of the big WeChat groups- people saying "our complex has been locked down." I also heard from one of my coworkers that some buildings in her complex are locked down, but residents in the other buildings are free to come and go.
Also, our complex announced that we are doing mandatory testing every day from July 8 to 10. (We are not locked down, fortunately. No covid cases have been reported in our complex from this recent mass testing.)
Oh also the gaokao is going on this week. The gaokao is kinda like the SAT, except more intense- like one's entire childhood is spent preparing for it, and it determines one's whole future. (That's a bit of an exaggeration, but overall yeah that's the impression I get.) It was supposed to be in June but was already delayed because of the Shanghai lockdown. There are a few special pandemic-related accommodations for students taking the gaokao. Special vehicles to take them to the exam site in a "closed loop" way if their complex is in lockdown. Also, students get their own individual test tube when they do the nucleic acid test. (Normally it's 10-20 people's swabs all together in each test tube, because it's expected that they're all negative, so no need to waste resources testing them all separately. But if one person is positive, you don't know who it is, so you have to track down everyone from the tube and re-test, and that's just something you don't want to have to deal with if you're in the midst of something as important and life-changing as the gaokao.)
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Office building is locked down
Okay, lol, I wrote this whole blog post and I was like "okay it's basically finished, I'll just come back and edit it when I have time later" and in the hours since then, I've checked the messages in the group chat for my job, and it turns out our office building is locked down now.
The official notice that was posted by the office building management doesn't say the exact situation, but it says they are closing for 7 days in accordance with the pandemic control, and they are in the process of identifying close contacts- so, sounds like there was a covid-positive person somewhere in the building.
Luckily, I have not received any text message saying I'm a close contact or anything like that. So it doesn't affect me, except that I'm going to have to work from home for at least part of next week (they said 7 days, but hey maybe it will turn out to be shorter).
Some people in the group chat were like "Are they going to be spraying disinfectant in our office? We have electronic equipment running in there" and HR said that if our company doesn't have any positive cases then the building management won't enter our office (and the building management doesn't have a key to our office anyway). So, hopefully that's true.
I now feel a little less weird about being the only one wearing a mask at work on Friday.
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OKAY SOMETHING IS GOING ON
Lol, you guys, another update, as I'm still in the process of finishing this post. Pudong New District (where I live) has announced that the entire district will be doing mandatory nucleic acid testing on July 10.
And I just saw a bunch of people in the big WeChat groups talking about more places they know that have been locked down.
It is starting to feel like whatever is going on is worse than what they've told us so far.
[let me real quick go delete all the parts of this post where I said everything is fine]
Or- optimistically- maybe they are being really intense about the lockdowns and testing right now so that this WON'T get worse. So then very soon everything will be fine.
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Overall feelings
So that's the situation. Overall, this week, most people are still going about their lives like normal- the subways are crowded, people go out to restaurants to eat, we're working in the office instead of at home (well, unless they literally lock down the building)- but we are a little bit afraid. [okay, speaking for myself, more than "a bit" afraid at this point]
I don't want to be in lockdown again. It was bad. Just last night, my husband bought a bunch of ice cream and put it in our freezer, and said, "When we were in lockdown, there was no way we could have gotten ice cream like this." And that's true. The option to just go out and buy ice cream whenever you want ice cream- that was so incredibly far from the way we lived during lockdown. We had very very few options for food- like, here's a huge bag of random vegetables, take it or leave it. And we certainly didn't have access to anything the apartment management didn't view as "essential". Like ice cream.
It was bad. And I'm not one of those expats all gung-ho about "China needs to end zero-covid"- I think covid is still dangerous, and I accept that theoretically, lockdowns could be a good thing to use to fight covid. But *this* government doing a lockdown? I don't trust *this* government to do it right. Sure, I could imagine some utopia where a government implements a lockdown in a non-f***ed-up way, but I have no confidence that it would play out that way here. It was bad.
So... maybe it will be this way for a while, in Shanghai- living with the threat of lockdown hanging over us, because the number of covid cases isn't *exactly exactly* zero, and that means it could suddenly break out again.
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Beijing's vaccine mandate
Beijing Requires Proof of COVID Vaccination to Enter Public Places (July 7)
This is in Beijing, not Shanghai, so it doesn't apply to me personally. But who knows, maybe they'll make this the policy in other Chinese cities too.
I'm not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, it's a good thing because the vaccination rate for elderly people in China is too low, which is the biggest reason that ending zero-covid would be disastrous. So if this policy pushes more elderly and vulnerable people to get vaccinated, that's good, and it's a necessary step toward ending zero-covid. (Eventually. Someday. I don't see it happening any time soon.)
But on the other hand, ughhh the amount of rules we have to deal with already, living in zero-covid China. I personally haven't had any huge problems, because I'm tech-savvy enough to figure out all the apps we need to use just to prove our "low risk" status so we can enter public places, and because I'm lucky enough that, for these pandemic-related apps, I haven't had any of the problems that international people often run into with Chinese computer systems which require real-name verification. Ugh, the Chinese systems are very much NOT set up for people who don't have a Chinese id card. If you change your passport number, if you enter your name slightly differently than how the computer system expected (does my last name go first or last? am I supposed to use all caps? spaces or no?), then it doesn't work. It's like, a labyrinth of bureaucracy, and here, let's add another requirement on top of that- you have to show proof of vaccination.
Like, if it was just "if you're vaccinated, then no problem" that would be one thing. But, knowing how things work in China, it's also possible that it's "if you're vaccinated, good luck trying to get the app to work to prove that you're vaccinated."
But hey, maybe they'll surprise me and the system will work totally fine for everyone, including international people. The rollout of the whole "scan the location codes" thing went way better than I expected, here in Shanghai.
And my other concern is, okay, what if someone who isn't vaccinated has some kind of emergency? We've heard stories of people who needed medical care but weren't allowed to enter a hospital because they didn't have a negative covid test or green health code or whatever. Is this going to be more of that?
It's a good idea, but I can't say I really trust *this* government to do it in a non-f***ed-up way.
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Links:
Sixth Tone
Shanghai Job Ads Discriminate Against Applicants Who Had COVID (July 5) Wow NOT COOL.
‘Thank You for Your Cooperation’ (June 19) This is a very good video. It's interviews with people in Shanghai, talking about their overall experiences during the lockdown.
SHINE
Disney denies rejecting a recovered COVID-19 job candidate (July 6)
US, Canada flights to Shanghai grounded over COVID-19 (July 2)
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