Life in Shanghai during the pandemic – From a Japanese point of view (part 2)

After eating up all the stew, I ate the frozen pasta and mixed rice I made before the lockdown. I also made some extra pasta while I still had some fresh vegetables.

The government then started realizing how people were making complaints, so they allowed food shopping on the Internet from mid-April as long as we ordered as a group. Procurement of the food became drastically easy & I was able to get what I wanted. Starting towards the end of April, food delivery was also permitted. As I was living alone, this really was good news.

It doesn't matter if it's a weekday or weekend, the door on my apartment house gets loudly knocked around 9:30AM. This means it's time for an antigen test. I have to do the test myself, but thanks to China being the world's leading IT country, there was a dedicated application explaining the steps in detail with a video clip. But it did take me a while to get used to sticking a cotton swab up my nose to take the specimen.

So, let's give it a try...

PCR tests are also made to all of the apartment residents in the afternoon every several days. By the loud knocks on the same floor, you know right away it is time for a PCR test. I would put on a surgical mask and get on the elevator which is packed. There is no physical distance among us. The lobby on the 1st floor is also packed with people. As many are asymptomatic, I have no idea who may be infected. I ponder to myself it's no wonder the new infections are increasing in number. As a fact, until mid-April, the number of newly infected people and death were increasing. I heard that they will forcefully take you to a quarantine facility if you test positive, so I was trembling with fear until I saw the negative test result. You may have heard about the poor condition of the quarantine facility which has rain leaks and no dividers between the beds.

Good and bad, China is known for repeating trial and error. They eventually decided to do the testing outside the apartment on the premise since the indoor testing got too packed with people. When there is no testing, the residents of the apartment gathered around this outdoor area to sunbathe, exercise, and play Chinese or Western chess. Since I was starting to put on weight after a month of not going out, I used a jumping rope in the basement parking lot in the evening on the weekdays & played mini-soccer in the courtyard on the weekends. But I still had a lot of time to kill on the weekends when I was not working. In a situation like this, I went out to the courtyard and grumbled over everything with other residents (mostly the foreigners).

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