‘No one cares’: Wuhan residents adapt to find food
BEIJING: The lockdown of Guo Jing’s neighborhood in Wuhan-the city at the heart of China’s new coronavirus epidemic-came suddenly and without warning. Unable to go out, the 29-year-old is now sealed inside her compound where she has to depend on online group-buying services to get food. “Living for at least another month isn’t an issue,” Guo told AFP, explaining that she had her own stash of pickled vegetables and salted eggs.
But what scares her most is the lack of control-first, the entire city was sealed off, and then residents were limited to exiting their compound once every three days. Now even that has been taken away. Guo is among some 11 million residents in Wuhan, a city in central Hubei province that has been under effective quarantine since January 23 as Chinese authorities race to contain the epidemic. Since then, its people have faced a number of tightening controls over daily life as the death toll from the virus swelled to over 2,500 in China alone.
But the new rules this month barring residents from leaving their neighborhoods are the most restrictive yet-and for some, threaten their livelihoods. “I still don’t know where to buy things once we’ve finished eating what we have at home,” said Pan Hongsheng, who lives with his wife and two children. Some neighborhoods have organized group-buying services, where supermarkets deliver orders in bulk.
But in Pan’s community, “no one cares”. “The three-year-old doesn’t even have any milk powder left,” Pan told AFP, adding that he has been unable to send medicine to his in-lawsboth in their eighties-as they live in a different area. “I feel like a refugee.” The “closed management of neighborhoods is bound to bring some inconvenience to the lives of the people”, Qian Yuankun, vice secretary of Hubei’s Communist Party committee, said at a press briefing last week.
Grocery groups
Demand for group-buying food delivery services has rocketed with the new restrictions, with supermarkets and neighborhood committees scrambling to fill orders. Most group-buying services operate through Chinese messaging app WeChat, which has ad-hoc chat groups for meat, vegetables, milk-even “hot dry noodles”, a famous Wuhan dish. More sophisticated shops and compounds have their own miniapp inside WeChat, where residents can choose packages priced by weight before orders are sent in bulk to grocery stores.
In Guo’s neighborhood, for instance, a 6.5kilogramme (14.3-pound) set of five vegetables, including potatoes and baby cabbage, costs 50 yuan ($7.11). “You have no way to choose what you like to eat,” Guo said. “You cannot have personal preferences anymore.” The group-buying model is also more difficult for smaller communities to adopt, as supermarkets have minimum order requirements for delivery.