COVID-19 in Shenzhen 1 Year Later — Myriad Misadventures

2020. The year many of us would rather forget. 1 year ago we were introduced to COVID-19. I remember beginning to hear news about a disease in Wuhan at the end of 2019 but I didn't think much of it. Why would I have? But by the time I got back from Osaka at the end of January things were starting to look bad. And by February the city seemed to have shut down. So what's Shenzhen like now, a little over a year later?

1 Year COVID blog park.png — The park near my apartment earlier this month

I did a couple of COVID-19 vlogs to show what things where like in Shenzhen between February and June 2020 but after that the city kind of seemed mostly normal and doing more vlogs didn’t seem to make sense. But now it’s been a year and it seems like to good time to revisit the topic. With a second outbreak of COVID-19 devastating India right now and a lot of western countries either sill in the throes of COVID-19 or just starting to (maybe unwisely?) Open back up, what’s it like in China where the virus first cropped up? Keep in mind I’m in Shenzhen, near the border with Hong Kong, not in Wuhan, where the virus was first identified. And Shenzhen never really had it too bad because of all the measures that the government put in place to keep the virus from spreading.

So how is it? Honestly very similar to how it was pre-COVID. And it has been for a while. The country’s lockdowns are sometimes described as draconian but there’s no denying that they were effective. We still have to wear masks when we go out although there are varying amounts of necessity, ranging from pretty low when in wide open outside areas to pretty high when on public transportation. You also still get your temperature taken to go into most places.

But all of those places are open. And mostly restriction-less. For a while restaurants had to spread out tables and limit how many people were sitting at them. And after movie theaters reopened people could only sit in every other seat. But all of this seems to be finished. Everything that didn’t go out of business has reopened, as far as I can tell, to where it was before COVID-19. It in many cases it has been. For example I went to a big Halloween party that didn’t cause any COVID-19 cases last October. In November I went to a local beer festival that was full of people. Even as early as May 2020, when I went to a coffee festival, things were starting to return to normal. Now a year later Shenzhen seems to resemble its 2019 self, but with more masks and temperature checkpoints.

The one possible exception is travel. I haven’t been very far from Shenzhen since COVID-19 began so I can’t speak about travel that much. As far as I know domestic travel is more or less back to normal. But international travel hasn’t quite recovered. It’s still hard to get into China and requires quarantine if you do. And when I went to the border with Hong Kong it was a ghost town. Seriously it was super creepy. But domestically things seem to be mostly normal. Or as normal as can be until the virus gets brought under control around the world.

I got lucky. Although it looked like China was a bad place to be at the beginning of 2020, as long as you weren’t in one of the early hard hit areas it turned out to be one of the safest places to be. The government was VERY serious about keeping the virus under control and things reopened much faster and much safer than in much of the world.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you on my next trip. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all the pictures and videos from my trips.