Life in Shanghai during the pandemic - From a Chinese point of view（part 1）

Blog-EN

2022年07月08日

China

Greetings, everyone. This is Xu Wenjun. I have been working for Netmarks Shanghai for 13 years and I am in charge of the General Affairs and Finance. My hobby is riding a bicycle, playing badminton, and reading books.

The information contained in this blog article is as of April 19th, 2022. For the latest information, please refer to Japan Consolate in China website or other appropriate sources.

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After March 2022, the media started to report on the various COVID-19 infection cases while the number of infected people were increasing. My colleagues started talking about COVID-19, and the clients and the suppliers have started working from home. Netmarks Shanghai allowed its employees to work from home on March 16th & we are currently monitoring the situations.

When I work from home, I wake up at 7:00AM in the morning and have a breakfast. By 8:40AM, I get ready to work by turning on the PC. My commute took 2 hours and a half each day, so I feel like I have more free time now that I started working from home.

On March 18th, all the residents of the condominiums in the same district had to go to a specified PCR testing spot.

中国人から見た上海パンデミック生活 — [Healthcare professionals and volunteers at the district PCR test center]

The district volunteers and the healthcare professionals (we call them DaBai) wore protective clothing and a face shield to conduct the PCR tests to all the residents of the district.

On March 21st, the district's resident committee reported that an infection was found at the condominium I live in & a monitoring tent was set up in the front of our building entrance.

When I heard my district vicinity would be closing, I hurried to a nearby market and purchased enough food (pork meat, steamed bum, vegetables, noodles and such) to last for a week. Within 1 hour of returning home, my building and the district got shut down. I could not even go down to the entrance of my condominium. My heart got filled with a lot of tensions at that time.

I got very nervous being shut down like this as I had to spend everyday in a condominium I cannot even go out on. The frequency of PCR tests increased gradually up to once every 2 days. The news also reported that COVID-19 infections are increasing in the city of Shanghai.

The amount of food I had started to get low as the static management went on. At first, I was able to purchase things using an applet to supplement the amount of food using various take-out applications. By "Static Management", it means that you stay at home, not go out unless there is a special reason, decrease the number of infections by not moving around, and to specify the people infected. I heard that with prior PCR test and a permission by the district management, one was able to go to the hospitals for injury and sickness, and the foreigners were allowed go outside to return to their home countries. The delivery personnel were given a special permission to go outside; however, they could not return back to their home once gone outside & many were living in a tent. Thus, a lot of criticisms were made against the strict static management.

(Addendum information: Impression of a Japanese staying in China regarding static management)

Shanghai district government defined static management as "only a partial control of the people's

movement in Shanghai to reduce the number of infections". In reality, a lot of people were not

allowed to go outside, and the shops started to stop their businesses as well. Thus, I feel that it's

not any different than a lock-down.

Then, the government stopped the shops from offering delivery services (to avoid infections from the delivered items) & the purchasing of food became even harder. The minimum amount of food distributed by the government was almost all gone. However, my anxiety had lessened a bit when the government made few more distributions.

[Food distributed by the government]

As the conditions of the infection got more serious, not only the PCR tests but also the antibody tests were performed. The results got registered in the application.

Life during the static management is all about working at home and getting PCR and antibody tests. Same is repeated every day. Despite that, new infection counts per day finally went above 10,000 people.

Finally, on March 28th, the government stopped all public transportations including bus, metro, taxi, Uber and such & closed all resident areas to take them under a management control. 2 areas were made to the East and West sides of Huangpu River which runs in the middle of Shanghai city. Each area was ordered to perform PCR testing according to the static management.

In the few days of writing this article, the new infections went over 20,000 a day, but are slightly decreasing in number. This is good news. I was quarantined at home for over a month and had been working from home. But working from home and being quarantined were inconvenient as I could not print things out at the office, get corporate stamps, nor go to government offices.

I have no idea when this static management in Shanghai ends, nor when I would be able to go back to the usual daily life. But, as a part of Shanghai citizen, I trust that the day will come soon.

Let's hang in there together!

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