COVID’s Back
When COVID-19 initially hit at the very beginning of 2020 most of China went into a sort of soft lockdown. Hard hit areas like Wuhan got legitimately locked down but down in Shenzhen, where I live, the lockdown was less serious and much shorter. And since then life has been largely normal. Not everything, obviously, with international still largely off the table. And masks were still mandatory and we often had to get our temperature checked or show our health code. But domestic travel was okay most of the time and pretty much everything was open and we could go places and do things. See a movie. Go to the gym. Eat at restaurants.
This was mostly do to very serious contact tracing when COVID-19 cases were discovered and small scale lockdowns of buildings or living complexes where the cases were found. The government also has the power to impose its will, like the lockdowns or ordering things closed, that western governments often can’t get away with. But it couldn’t last forever. Right now Shenzhen, in addition to a couple of other places like Jilin and Shanghai, is in the middle of the most serious wave of COVID-19 since the very beginning of the pandemic.
Cases in Shenzhen started showing up in January right before schools went on vacation for Chinese New Year but I don’t think anybody was really worried. It didn’t start to seem serious until school was supposed to resume at the beginning of February. The start date first got pushed back to February 14 from February 7 then moved online, where it still is. Classes have yet to resume in person. Then more and more complexes where COVID-19 was detected started to get locked down and businesses in the vicinity had to close. We weren’t moving in a good direction.
It came to a head last week, in the middle of March. I guess because the more localized responses weren’t working and cases continued to trend upward the government decided to put pretty much the entire city on lockdown for a week. Schools continued online. Businesses that could work from home were told to. Businesses that couldn’t (gyms, movie theaters) had to close. The only things that were allowed to stay open were things that were considered necessary like supermarkets and hospitals. Restaurants were also allowed to stay open to but only for delivery. People were mostly confined to their apartment buildings or complexes. Even public transport stopped running.
The tentative last day of this new lockdown was set as March 20. Today. Tomorrow we should be back to “normal" but I don’t know if that date will stick or if it’s going to get moved back. Cases, at least in Futian district where I live, don’t seem to be going down particularly fast. I’ve heard. I’ve heard that most of the city will open back up but Futian, where a lot of the cases were concentrated, will largely remain locked down. Of course I don’t know if that’s true or not and I won’t know until tomorrow.
I also don’t know what prompted this big wave of COVID-19 cases. Shenzhen, and China in general, has snuffed out any cases previously. It could be that the enormous outbreak in next door Hong Kong spilled over into Shenzhen and there was too much to handle here. Or it could be because Omicron is more transmissible and harder to detect than previous variants of the virus. Or it could be both. All I know is we got hit pretty hard.
Without delving into a bunch of Chinese official accounts, which my Chinese isn’t good enough to read, there’s no way for me to know what will happen tomorrow. Fingers crossed that this past week reversed the uptick of cases and we can go “back to normal.”
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