I'm in the US (why don't y'all wear masks?)

A sign that says "Masks are optional." Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Hi everyone, just wanted to put an update here and say I'm in the US! After being stuck in China for 3 years! (I mean, not literally stuck, it was easy to leave China and hard to get back in...)

My son and I are here on vacation for a few weeks, and then back to China. Fortunately, China no longer requires a quarantine when entering the country. All that's required is 1 negative nucleic acid test before you get on the plane. (There have been so many versions of the rules about getting into China during the past 3 years- the policies have changed a whole bunch of times. Now it's so easy though- just 1 nucleic acid test.)

How do I feel about being in the US? Well, it's great being here, but the really weird thing is I don't feel like I've been gone for 3 years. (Sort of like the mirror of what I wrote in this 2013 post.) Everything seems so natural and like I fit right in. I guess this is a kind of reverse culture shock.

It's great, and I don't want to be away for 3 years again. In the Before Times, I came to the US twice a year. That was a good amount- I want to do that. And I can now, because zero-covid has ended and it's no longer hard to get into China. (I mean, China is still not issuing tourist visas, but for people who legitimately live there- like me- it's not hard to get into China.)

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Why don't y'all wear masks?

Like, this strikes me as super weird. We get off the plane, walking around in the airport, and most people aren't wearing masks. ??? Why not? You're in an airport. Why would you not wear a mask?

And basically everywhere we went, in public, sometimes crowded places- most people are not wearing masks. Why not???

I have some thoughts about it, but since I'm on vacation I don't want to spend time blogging about it now, so I guess maybe I'll write a post on it some other time.

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A few other covid-related differences

So, at a lot of stores in the US, they have plexiglass set up in front of the cashier, so you're not breathing on them. I've never seen that in China.

Also, apparently, in the US, social distancing was a real thing. There are marks on the floor showing you where to wait in line, and people actually did that. In China, we had the marks on the floor, but nobody ever paid attention to them. We barely did any social distancing. With a few exceptions: I remember at Shanghai Disneyland, the employees were enforcing social distancing at some of the places where you wait in line, and when you meet a character there are marks on the ground showing that you have to stand a certain distance from them- and that's enforced. And during the Shanghai lockdown when we all got mass-tested every 2 days, they were telling us we had to stand in line 2 meters apart, and people actually paid attention to that and did it. (Definitely not everybody did it though.)

I think in China, there is just less of a concept of having "personal space." Like when you wait in line, the person behind you is RIGHT THERE, and that's just seen as normal. If you left a bit of space, people would think you're not actually in the line, and they'd cut in front of you. So social distancing never really caught on. Also, the Chinese government needed to make covid rules that were an absolute thing- having a vague sense that probability generally increases as distance decreases just wouldn't have fit into the policies.

I've also heard people in the US talking about staying a certain distance away from someone who might have been exposed to covid, and calculating which day they would be contagious if in fact they were infected- and we just never really did any of that in China. Like, they either label you a close contact and put you in quarantine, or they don't. There's no "well, it's probably fine if you stay X distance away from them/ if they were exposed yesterday because they won't be contagious yet/ etc."

The key thing here, I think, is that in the US, everyone's on their own. So you assess the risk to you as an individual. If there's a 1 in 1000 chance you could get covid, well, that's pretty small, so you don't worry about it. But in China, the government was trying to stop 1 billion people from having covid. If there's a 1 in 1000 chance that someone has covid, and over the course of several weeks there have been thousands of people identified who are in that situation, well probably at least one of them really does have covid, and we just can't have covid-positive people walking around in society, so we have to quarantine ALL of them.

(Of course, this isn't the case any more, because the zero-covid policy has ended, and the Chinese government is just letting everyone have covid now.)

So for Chinese people, the set of things that would get you put into quarantine is a much bigger set than the things that make you have a high probability of actually having covid. I think it will take some time for me to work out what the actual risk to me is and how to go about life.

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Links

A few links on the goings-on in China:

Sixth Tone: 

‘It’s Finally Over,’ Say Doctors in China as COVID Cases Ebb (February 9)

SHINE:

Suishenban now offers free Chinese-English PCR tests (February 7)