Living not ‘with COVID,’ but with ‘zero COVID’

SHENZHEN, CHINA >> The signs of a looming lockdown in Shenzhen, China, had been building for a while. The city had been logging a few coronavirus infections for days. Daily COVID-19 tests were required to go pretty much anywhere. Individual buildings had been sealed off.

So when a hotel employee woke me up a little after 7 a.m. to explain that we were not allowed to step outside for four days, my initial disorientation quickly turned to resignation.

Of course this happened. I live in China.

As the rest of the world sheds more restrictions by the day, China’s rules are becoming more entrenched, along with the patterns of pandemic life under a government insistent on eliminating cases. People schedule lunch breaks around completing mandatory tests. They restructure commutes to minimize the number of health checkpoints along the way.

A sense of possible disaster always lurks, driven by the experiences of Shanghai and other cities, where sudden lockdowns have left residents without food or medicine. A friend bought a second freezer so she could stock up on groceries.

Yet the policies have been in place for so long, and with so little sign of easing, that navigating them feels — if not normal — at least routine. I know which testing site near my home returns results the quickest, and which grocer doesn’t check whether you’ve logged your visit for future contact tracing.

The disruptive becomes typical; the once-unimaginable, reality. The pandemic has imposed new rituals around the world, but in China, the extremes make that process more unsettling. The most obviously jarring aspects, for me, were technological. China under “zero COVID” is a web of digital codes. At the entrance to every public space — restaurants, apartment complexes, even public restrooms — is a printed-out QR code that people must scan with their phones to log their visit. Everyone also has a personal health code, which uses test results and location history to assign a color. Green is good. Yellow or red and you may be sent to quarantine.

What actually determines the color of your code, though, is nebulous. When a banking scandal prompted protests in Henan province this year, officials manipulated protesters’ health codes to block them from gathering. The morning in August that a colleague and I were scheduled to fly from the southern city of Guangzhou to Shanghai, her code suddenly, without explanation, turned yellow, meaning she could not board the plane. A health worker said the code would revert if she took another COVID-19 test (never mind that we’d been taking daily tests for two weeks). It did — barely an hour before takeoff.

Testing sites are ample, at least, since the government has ordered they be within a 15-minute walk in cities. And they are easily identified even from afar. They usually have a line, which can grow to be blocks long during lunchtime or after work. Many also have their own soundtrack: a prerecorded voice, ordering people to stand 1 meter apart, blaring through a megaphone on loop.

On hot days, people wait sometimes for 30 minutes, face masks plastered to their skin by sweat. In the city of Chongqing this summer, residents lined up while wildfires raged nearby. The night I landed in Shanghai, officials had raised a typhoon warning, and ordered the skyline, including the iconic Pearl Tower, darkened in case of a power outage. I huddled with dozens of people in a testing line under umbrellas.

Some features of COVID19-ERA China are testaments to human creativity. The Guangzhou Library offers book sterilizing machines, which look like high-tech refrigerators. Manufacturers of personal protective equipment have devised individual air conditioning units, which inflate medical workers’ hazmat suits with cool air.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS