[Editor’s note: Our Shanghai correspondent continues to report on the lifting of COVID restrictions in Shanghai.}
A month after Shanghai officially lifted the city-wide lockdown, Covid cases ceased to be zero at one point but has unsurprisingly started to resurge again. One positive case was found out in one of the buildings in my compound so that the building was under a new round of 2-week lockdown. Luckily, it is only one building rather than the whole compound. This is called targeted prevention. However, with new compounds placed under lockdown, we’re under some pre-state of caution. No one wants the city to go down the citywide lockdown again, but who knows?
Right after June 1st, I quickly moved back to the recently-furnished apartment, of which was delayed due to the sudden lockdown at the end of March. I work for a Fortune 500 American company which also went through a hectic move due to fear of unpredictable lockdown policies. We’re afraid that any increase of positive cases will throw us back to lockdown anytime.
New normality means that it is normality with restrictions. In the past one month, all restaurants and bars were still forbidden from indoor dining to comply with the social distancing requirements. For restaurant owners, indoor dining constitutes over 70% of their entire revenue. I read the statistics from one plea letter from a group of restaurant owners on social media. In all industries, F&B is the one who gets hit the most during lockdown. A handful of restaurants and bars closed down permanently due to the cash flow rupture. For bars, you saw the interesting scene of crowds of young people sitting down by the road and enjoying some pleasure of meeting their friends and having some beers. What’s the point of lifting the lockdown but still prohibiting any social contacts? Thank god that on June 29th, the city finally allowed dining-ins, which in turn inevitably gave rise to the case resurgence. Shanghai seems to fall back into its never-ending vicious cycle.
I live in Puxi of Shanghai, a part of which was officially placed under lockdown on March 1st and it ended the lockdown on June 1st, so it was 2-month in total. Many people, like me, went from utter horror of the virus itself to the abhorrence of lockdown. The virus didn’t kill people but isolation and the near shutdown of entire healthcare did kill. A few mental health cases where depression patients committed suicide due to the long isolation; there were also a few cases where people with emergent health issues got delayed receiving proper ER care and therefore lost their lives. It was difficult for the government to react properly in the state of emergency, and that was particularly the case with the Shanghai government. Ever since the Japanese war, Shanghai has always been the outliner of the entire China; it has a relatively high self-governance due to its important role as the financial free hub of China. The role of government is not as valued as it is in other cities like Beijing; instead, economic autonomy is highly valued.
Some of my Beijing colleagues told me about the important political authority of their local neighborhood community office. In Shanghai, that is unimaginable; these local offices are deemed incapable, the bureaucracy and often they are. Majority of social workers and administrative staff are part-time housewives or recently-retired grandmas. When there is a citywide emergency, these grassroots political offices are not at least equipped with any capability, resources and authority to react. One of the local officers in my district sadly committed suicide due to unsurmountable pressure to execute strict Covid policies. It was truly a tragedy and makes people wonder what kind of draconian policies were forced on those powerless and under-trained civil workers and could have pushed a person to such a dark place that he decided to take his own life.
The situation is also the same for those who work at the community-level healthcare organization. My father works as a family physician at the local community health center. During the high time of Covid cases, all healthcare decisions were frantically enforced from Beijing rather than the public health department and could change four to five times during a 24-hour period of time. Doctors were on call 24 hours and were asked to live in the hospital or hotels nearby so as to act on the policies in time. Towards the end of May, strict zero-Covid policy was already on the line because all civil workers and healthcare professionals were on their last straw.
Despite lingering restrictions after June 1st, most of us were optimistic. None of us wants Shanghai to go back to lockdown again. However, with neighborhoods after neighborhoods going through a new round of lockdown, I really can’t be sure what will happen. A new Omicron mutation has just been found a couple of days ago. Policies are being tightened as a result. Residents still have the freedom but we’re all cautious. One interesting thing that’s happening on Chinese media is that there’s less Covid news bombarding our ears; instead, domestic flooding disasters and international political news are all over the news to the extent that my 80-year-old grandfather called me to talk about Boris Johnson’s resignation and Shinzo Abe’s assassination. I cannot help but wonder whether it’s the government is throwing the dead cat away so as to avert citizens’ aversion to this never-ending zero-Covid policy. Similar things happened during the lockdown when Shanghai residents’ appeals on social media was tackled severely by the “digital police”. When you search for “lack of food in Shanghai lockdown” on Chinese social media, no results could be found. What would actually happen in Shanghai in the next couple of months? I have absolutely no idea. Virus will keep mutating and its inflectional rate thereafter increases. Would strict zero-Covid still be working without irreversibly hurting Shanghai’s economy? There are so many questions and uncertainties. Shanghai needs to grasp better at balancing Covid case control while at the same time helping its residents back to the actual normality; delegating authority to healthcare professionals to make sound public health decisions rather than politicizing Covid and its policies against Western; let science and truth speak rather than trying to save politicians’ face. It is not easy to do all of the above but do we really have a choice here? I don’t think so.
