#SHANGHAI ON LOCKDOWN FULL#

I waved goodbye to mom as the government workers hauled her off to one of the 288 schools that had been converted into isolation sites. Twenty-four days into the lockdown, my mom - who like my dad and I had not set foot outside the apartment except for a mandatory test – saw the dreaded double line in her daily self-administered antigen test. This might have helped ease people’s nerves, but there’s little evidence it did anything to stop the virus spreading.

#SHANGHAI ON LOCKDOWN FULL#

Many of us responded by becoming model Chinese citizens, volunteering to disinfect the estate and help distribute food and essential goods – all of which had to be delivered – directly to people’s doors.Īnd the volunteers sanitized with a vengeance, lugging around 30-kilogram (66-pound) tubs of chemicals and donning full hazmat suits to douse in disinfectant every incoming package, every nook and cranny.īy the time they had finished, the building was so awash with chemicals that some of my neighbors’ touchscreen electronic door locks had corroded and stopped working. The city initially told the residents the lockdown would be lifted on April 5 in fact it lasted until June 1. The community testing site at Serenitie Wang's residential compound on April 4, 2022. In Hong Kong, Omicron was running amok, but in Shanghai cases were still in the single digits and with China’s iron-fisted approach to infections it seemed reasonable to think things would stay that way. Still less could I have foreseen that, after serving three weeks of government-mandated quarantine on arrival, my housing compound would be hermetically sealed for a further 49 days straight, or that my mom and I would catch Covid, or that I would be carted off for a further spell of isolation at one of the government’s notorious “fangcang” camps.Īnd if you’d told me then that it would be under the glaring strip lights of one of those “fangcang” camps, amid the whiff of dubious makeshift toilets and the dirty laundry of thousands of strangers, that I would have an epiphany about the joys of communal living and the mental health benefits of enforced breaks, well … then I probably wouldn’t have believed you.Īt the time I boarded the plane, the siren song of Shanghai – my hometown – seemed hard to resist. Little could I have known as I boarded the plane that my cunning escape plan would take me from the frying pan into the fire that as I landed in Shanghai I would be swapping the world’s biggest outbreak for the “world’s strictest lockdown” – and 70 days of enforced confinement. It was early March and the city was in the throes of the biggest coronavirus outbreak per capita in the world. Positive results are followed up on an individual level.When I left a Covid-ravaged Hong Kong, I was in search of a sanctuary. The government said it collected 25.7 million samples in 2.4 million test tubes, and almost 80 percent of the total had been tested by Tuesday morning.

Shanghai reported a record 13,086 new asymptomatic coronavirus cases on Monday, authorities said, up from 8,581 the previous day, after more than 25 million people were swabbed in 24 hours in the citywide testing campaign. Sun Chunlan, vice premier in charge of Covid prevention, urged grassroots Communist Party organizations to “do everything possible” to help residents solve problems, such as access to medicine, food and water.

A medical worker tests a Shanghai resident for the coronavirus on Monday. “The most important thing is the problem of personal compliance,” he said.

Thousands of residents have been locked up in rudimentary quarantine facilities after testing positive, whether they are symptomatic or not.Ĭhen Erzhen, a doctor in charge of one Shanghai quarantine facility, said in an interview with the Communist Party newspaper the People’s Daily at the weekend that it was possible that authorities would revise guidelines and allow asymptomatic people to stay home, especially if the number of cases mounted.

Shanghai on lockdown