Zero COVID in Shenzhen
I touched a bit on some of the COVID rules in China in last week’s post and I’ve been posting photos about life in zero COVID China the last couple of weeks on Instagram so this seems like a good week for a blog post about it too. I’ll touch upon what it was like the last couple of years then get to 2022, which has been the worst year yet. At least as I remember it. And in Shenzhen. Different cities have different rules and I don’t know how other cities fared.
2020
Let’s start at the beginning. I remember reading about COVID, although it wasn’t called that yet, at the end of 2019. Nobody knew what it was yet. Or if it was even actually a thing. I was actually in Japan when COVID really started spreading around China. As we were getting ready to fly back to Shenzhen at the end of our trip Max said we needed to buy masks because they were sold out in China. I thought that was ridiculous but when we got back she was right. They were definitely hard to find. Initially a lot of things closed. Cities without huge numbers of cases like Wuhan were still mostly open but lots of things were closed early on. Jobs and school were moved online and restaurants were closed and then only allowed to do pick up or delivery. We also had to have our temperature taken to enter places. Then health codes were introduced and we had to show the code in addition to having our temperature taken. By the end of the year we weren’t doing so bad. The borders were closed so we couldn’t travel and we needed masks and health codes but most stuff was open. I remember going to a pretty big Halloween party that October.
2021
I honestly don’t remember much from 2021, which probably means not much was going on. Borders were still closed but we could travel domestically. Max and I went to Guangxi and although we had to scan things all the time and sign up to go to at least one place there wasn’t anywhere we couldn’t go, or that was limited because of tests or codes. There were a couple of flareups when we needed to get COVID tests a couple of days in a row but for the most part we only needed to show our green code, not a negative test.
2022
I’m not going to defend China’s zero COVID strategy but China was fairly successful with it in 2020 and 2021. It wasn’t great for businesses but the worst part was probably early 2020. Some certainly did close though and I have no numbers or anything to check. It’s definitely possible that way more stuff closed than I realized. And infections and deaths do seem to have been kept fairly low. The obvious question is was it worth it and I can’t answer that. I have my opinions as I imagine most people do. But I think everyone can agree that everything started to fall apart in 2022.
Omicron really started spreading at the beginning of the year. I didn’t really think much of it at first. The spring semester got delayed and moved online and we had a week of COVID tests. But that had happened in 2021 as well. But then later Shenzhen got locked down for a week. Shanghai was locked down for much longer shortly after and some other places followed suit, including some cities on Hainan island. I’d guess plenty of smaller cities got locked down as well and we just didn’t hear about it. Border cities often seemed to struggle with COVID a lot. More recently some areas of Guangzhou got locked down, as did the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou where Apple manufactures a lot of iPhones. 2021 didn’t see lockdowns on anything close to this scale, at least not in any large cities.
Testing also became VERY frequent. For most of the year Shenzhen has required proof of a COVID test in the last 24 to 72 hours to do most things. I remember in being longer at the beginning of the year and then become 24 hours for a lot of stuff towards the end of the year. Some places like public transportation only required a a 48 hour test code but to get into lots of buildings you needed a 24 hour code.
And you never knew when something was going to get closed. If there were too many cases my apartment complex would close a bunch of the entrances to funnel people in and out of just a couple. Kind of a pain when you had to walk the long way around just to get out of the complex to go to work. I remember a metro exit I use sometimes get gated off along with the surrounding buildings once. The metro itself was still open though. One morning I got a text saying that the metro station I get off of to go to work was closed. I was late that day.
Now
This past weekend the governments of some cities, including Shenzhen, seemed to start relaxing the rules. There are reasons that this probably happened but I’m not going to get into that in this post. In loosening the rules though the government has pulled an about face. They were just talking about how zero COVID was still completely necessary because of how dangerous COVID was and how much bad stuff happened to the west. And now it’s no big deal. Omicron isn’t a problem at all. If I’m being frank it’s more than a little ridiculous. I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling.
Now in Shenzhen we can go to lots of places, like supermarkets, restaurants, and offices no longer need a test, just a green health code and other places like internet cafes and karaokes require a 48 hour code. In practice this means we’ll still need a test code at least some of the time to go to some places but most day to day places don’t need them anymore. Not quite where I’d like to be yet but getting there.
Living in China during the third year of zero COVID has been trying but maybe the rules are starting to move in a better direction. Make sure to check out the two weeks of photos I posted on Instagram for a little more insight into what COVID was like in Shenzhen in 2022.
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