Weary Chinese learning to live with coronavirus
Lena Zhang was ready to catch Covid-19 as she embarked on her first visit to China in three years, a visit that coincided with an explosion of infections across the country.
Before the pandemic, Zhang visited her parents in the northern city of Baoding from Austria every year. But China’s strict pandemic border controls and Zhang’s fear of passing the virus to elderly relatives had stopped her from returning since 2019.
After Beijing removed quarantine and other restrictions on entry last month, Zhang decided to make the long journey home for Lunar New Year – even though the country was, for the first time since the pandemic began, experiencing a nationwide outbreak. Fully expecting to get infected on arrival, she prepared for a cautious celebration spent almost entirely at home.
The reality for Zhang, 42, and her family has been a quiet but relatively relaxed and surprisingly normal celebration – because most people, including almost everyone in her family, caught the virus a while ago. Grocery stores and farmers’ markets have been crowded.
‘‘It seems difficult to get infected,’’ she joked, alluding to the apparent current sweet spot of post-infection immunity.
In the short six weeks from China suddenly dropping its ‘‘zero Covid’’ policy to the middle of January, a huge surge of infection, critical cases and deaths overwhelmed hospital emergency departments, and forced crematoriums to work non-stop.
Epidemiologists feared that a month of concentrated travel for the Spring Festival holiday, centred around Lunar New Year celebrations on January 22, would extend the outbreak and bring it deep into rural areas, where the population is older and medical facilities are often basic.
Instead, Chinese health authorities have this week doubled down on claims that the peak of deaths was in early January, and say a second wave is unlikely to hit soon.
Such a speedy recovery is at odds with international projections that suggest a far higher death toll than the official count
of just over 72,000 since restrictions were suddenly dropped in early December.
But many Chinese families, exhausted by three years of unpredictable disruption to their lives, have spent the Spring Festival holiday trying to move on.
Officials began the holiday on a cautiously optimistic note. President Xi Jinping broke with a decade-long tradition of visiting the countryside ahead of the holiday, instead holding a virtual call with rural residents. ‘‘Tough challenges remain,’’ he said, ‘‘but the light of hope is right in front of us.’’
As the holiday progressed, the drumbeat of upbeat propaganda grew louder as reminders of the outbreak started to fade into the background. Eager for a longawaited return to normality, many families appear happy to accept a sense of relief and forget about the virus for the holidays as some are reunited for the first since the start of the pandemic.
Since the outbreak of the virus just before Spring Festival in 2020, those employed far from home in construction or manufacturing
were strongly encouraged by officials to forgo their once-a-year visit home over Lunar New Year and remain wherever they were employed.
This week, moving videos uploaded by returning migrant workers who surprise young children or elderly parents have been shared widely online, often tagged with a simple threecharacter description: ‘‘It’s been three years’’.
Official propaganda has spurred on the sense of a new beginning. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, a Covid-themed skit was absent from the state broadcaster’s annual Spring Festival gala. Its live audience did not wear masks.
Before Lunar New Year, the Cybersecurity Administration of China urged vigilance against ‘‘gloomy sentiments’’ and pandemic-related rumours, in a bid to ‘‘cultivate a positive, spiritually healthy atmosphere for online public opinion during Spring Festival’’.
The censor’s heavy hand has been evident. Videos of patients
packed into hospital hallways, once widely shared, have become hard to find online. Instead, dominating social media discussion are topics such as which Chinese movie will top the holiday box office.
Regardless of the veracity of the official pronouncements, many in China now, after a period of caution, appear ready to accept that the pandemic is coming to an end.
Holiday train, plane and road travel is near pre-Covid levels, with 700 million trips having been taken as of January 26. Tourists have flocked to popular sightseeing destinations across the country. The southern island of Hainan, sometimes called China’s Hawaii, has been especially popular as people flee record-breaking cold in the north.
Zhang and her family in Baoding have joined those going south – prepared, once again, to accept the risk of getting infected on the way.
‘‘I’m heading to Hainan on yet another packed plane,’’ she said by text. ‘‘Let’s see what happens.’’