In the spring of 2022, a crossroads in Shanghai under lockdown
My parents and I live in two communities not far apart in Shanghai. During the city-wide lockdown due to the coronavirus in the spring of 2022, I felt the difficulty of living and the deprivation of freedom together with other people living in this city. What made me and my family even more disturbed and painful was my mother infected with the virus, and the Chinese government adopted mandatory quarantine policy for inected.
On the night of March 27, 2022, the Shanghai Government announced that the Pudong New District would enter a complete lockdown first. Fruit shops that were previously restricted and unable to open stores before were told allow to open temporarily, leaving only a few hours for people to go out to purchase supplies, but those living in closed communities were still unable to go out. The choice entanglement that people may have in normal shopping no longer exists, and the vegetable market is quickly sold out, and some hawkers selling high-priced vegetables appear on the road. Customers in small supermarkets lined up next to each other to check out and pay.
At the beginning of the lockdown, the supply of food and other materials was obviously lagging behind, and the government did not provide the necessary supplies to the residents who were locked at home. Young people can use the online shopping app on their smartphones to buy foods (it needs to be bought regularly in the early morning, and there are often insufficient supplies to make the purchase unsuccessful), but this operation is obviously difficult for my parents in their 70s and 80s, I can only buy food for them at home through online shopping apps and by joining group buying groups spontaneously organized by residents of my parents’ community on the social software WeChat. Because my mother was traumatized when she was young and her self-protection ability was weak, she might have mask with incorrect method or did not sanitize themselves strictly when she went downstairs to pick up food at the gate of the community, so she was told that she was infected with the new coronavirus during the nucleic acid test and screening.
In fact, she did not have any symptoms of the virus, but the Chinese government implemented a strict "clearance" policy, requiring that the virus-infected person must be sent to a designated isolation point, and my mother has no full capacity for civil conduct, so my family does not agree with her going to isolation without the company of her family.
When the CDC and my family obtained my mother’s situation by phone, we raised this concern, the staff said that they had made a record in the system that they would not be transferred temporarily. However, in the middle of night of the second day, a staff member called and said that they would come to pick up my mother for isolation and transfer (it seems that the staff who notified the transfer and the actual transfer staff were not in the same system).
After that, the neighborhood committee began to understand the situation of my family and responded to the CDC. Neighborhood committees are interpreted in Chinese law as an organization formed spontaneously by residents. During the lockdown, residents are not allowed to go out, and also it is difficult to get through the disease control office and citizen hotlines. Often, the only way to communicate with government departments is through the neighborhood committees. The neighborhood committee said that there is currently no corresponding medical institution that can accept my mother's situation.
The lockdown is still in progress, and no one knows when the lockdown will be lifted, unable to leave the community, and lack of supplies. One morning, someone in the community committed suicide by jumping off a building.
During the lockdown period in Shanghai, some people set up tents on the side of the road for temporary living because they could not return home.
An alarm was installed on the door of my parents' house, and they were not allowed to go out. When the door was opened, a high-frequency warning sound was played. They don't like to cause trouble to others, but when a virus-infected person is found in a building, the whole building will be closed.
To unblock the building, the centers for Disease Control and Prevention must lifted my mother's status of being infected with the new coronavirus by the . My mother did not have any symptoms of infection, and the infection should have turned negative in terms of time (the virus has been cleared by the body's own immunity).
For the safety of my mother, it is impossible for my family to let her go to isolation alone, and there is no isolation point suitable for my mother's situation, so the date of unblocking the building cannot be known. I could only ask my neighbors on the same building to forgive me, and give my family some time to wait for an organization to accept my mother for quarantine with family accompany. Most neighbors expressed their understanding, but a few, especially the neighbors downstairs of my parents’ house, reacted strongly due to fear of being infected.
The staff of the neighborhood committee had no choice but to give my family a solution "not a solution": let me call the 120 emergency number and falsely claim that my mother had a heart attack and needed first aid, and let the 120 ambulance pull my mother out of the community then deal it. Some residents proposed to build a temporary house in the open space of the community for my mother to live in, so that the building where her home is located can be unsealed earlier. These suggestions are all absurd and unacceptable to my family.
Afterwards, the government's relevant policies were adjusted. For asymptomatic positive infections who have not been transferred for a long time, doctors can be arranged to conduct nucleic acid tests at home. At the same time, the neighborhood committee also informed my family that they had contacted the quarantine place to receive my mother, and finally I accompanied my mother to take the bus arranged by the government to the quarantine place. And not long after my mother left her home, a doctor came to do a nucleic acid test for her, multiple departments still didn't coordinate their work well.
The transfer is also carried out at night, which strengthens the sense of uneasiness of the transferred people. The driving area in the transfer bus is separated from the infected area by a plastic film. Most of the transshippers are young parents with young children, and the elderly. The bus goes to a community in the same residential area, picks up people and then drives to the next community. Two hours later, an old man in the car said he wanted to get out of the car to go to the toilet, but the driver didn't agree. Fortunately, he arrived at the destination very quickly, which was an express hotel temporarily requisitioned by the government.
After checking in, it was a room with two single beds, and the room was fairly clean. When it was time to eat, the volunteers would put the food on the ground in front of the door of the room, knock on the door and inform us to take it away.
During this period, my mother and I had two nucleic acid tests, and we were allowed to go home after we got negative results. We didn’t have to take a chest X-ray as rumored, and then we could go home only after a professional doctor made a judgment on the condition of the infected person.
The fees of entire isolation process, including our meals, was borne by the government. But if my family had the right to choose, we would not leave home to the isolation point. Not to mention that the resources invested by the country could have been used for people who need help more.
After returning to the community, the staff of the neighborhood committee distributed disinfection tools and a large bag of pre-decocted traditional Chinese medicine to my mother to take, and asked my mother and I not to go out for a week as a self-health observation at home.
A week later, the residential building where the parents lived was unblocked. The neighborhood committee asked me to sign a wish letter refusing to enter the house for disinfection, so fortunately there was no further violation of personal rights encountered by some families of infected persons.
For a period of time thereafter, the government still required the people to take a national nucleic acid test every few days, and the staff of the neighborhood committee asked my mother not to participate. They were worried that my mother’s condition would revert to positive, which would delay the unblocking of the entire community.
On June 1, Shanghai basically lifted the overall blockade. Cars can go on the road, people can go out, can enter supermarkets, workplaces and other places with limited access by a green health QR code.
For a period of time, some neighbors still looked at my parents with discriminatory eyes, such as verbal indifference, unwillingness to share the same elevator, etc.
Recalling what happened a year ago is painful, but if you just choose to forget, it is connivance to the government's inhumane policies and indifference to the victims of China's epidemic prevention policy.
"I was ready to die for this," my eighty-five-year-old father said at the time.
(End)
Jiang Weigang
April 30, 2023
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