Going to a bar and, because one of the customers had contact with someone with Covid-19, seeing the doors close and being able to leave only after 48 hours and with negative tests for the disease. Being stuck at work on the eve of maternity leave because someone contaminated passed by. Or at a trade show, at a factory where you don’t even work, at a friend’s building.
All these are reports heard by the sheet of episodes that took place in Shenzhen and Shanghai, two of the most important cities in China, which is currently facing the worst outbreak of Covid-19 since the first wave of the disease, between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020.
Since then, the country has relatively successfully controlled the spread of the virus and boasts very low numbers, with a harsh policy known as Covid zero, in which no level of contamination is considered acceptable.
Now, however, with new outbreaks hitting cities vital to the economy as most of the world reverts to the old normal, part of the population questions the cost of maintaining rigidity. And the regime is showing signs of loosening up, even if it doesn’t admit it in the official discourse.
A clear example is Hong Kong, where the arrival of the omicron variant hit a poorly vaccinated elderly population hard and took the number of deaths to an average of 285 a day at the worst time of this month, on March 14.
The number of new cases, after reaching a peak of more than 65,000 a day on average at the beginning of the month, began to fall rapidly to less than 15,000 last Thursday (24). This Saturday (26), there were 8,841 diagnoses (against 10,400 in the previous 24 hours) and 139 deaths. Scientists call for a review of the Covid zero strategy.
On Tuesday, Gabriel Leung, who heads a team of researchers advising the local government, called on journalists to urge that the tactic now focus efforts not on lockdowns but on vaccination — before a new wave of cases “closes Hong Kong down.” forever”.
Scientists estimate that about 60% of the city’s population of 7.5 million has become infected in this latest wave. This week, the city authorized flights from the US, UK and Canada, hitherto banned, and reduced the mandatory quarantine from 14 to 7 days.
The numbers from Hong Kong, considered a special administrative region, do not enter China’s total case count, which has much lower figures – the worst outbreak in two years in so-called mainland China, with just over 4,000 daily cases, would be a number celebrated in other parts of the world.
The country has decreed lockdowns in places that accumulate a few dozen cases, such as Shenzhen, a city of 17 million that borders Hong Kong.
But the speed of reopening – on Monday (21), after eight days of quarantine – showed signs of less strict rules. Shenzhen is considered a kind of Chinese Silicon Valley, where the headquarters of multinationals such as Huawei and Tencent are located, as well as a Foxconn factory, which produces iPhones.
There were fears that the isolation would last the same as in Xi’an, a city in the central region of the country, with 13 million inhabitants, which spent a month in complete lockdown, between December and January.
Shortly after the restrictions were enacted in Shenzhen, Chinese leader Xi Jinping publicly stated that the country’s economy should be protected, and so the city began isolating only neighborhoods, buildings or establishments with recorded cases.
The reopening was greeted with relief by Renata Doria Miguel, 37, who works as a product developer. “Things change a lot at the last minute, and with a child at home it was very difficult not to be able to go out,” says she, who has lived in China for eight years.
Before, Renata had already been locked up for a week, being able to circulate only through the condominium, after a resident registered contact with a contaminated person —the country has a QR Code and tracking system through which it is possible to know where each person circulated and with whom they interacted. .
“It’s a lottery. You’re in one place, someone with Covid is on your side and you need to isolate yourself. A friend has been in lockdown since February because a case was confirmed in a neighboring building and then others were overlapping.”
There is no shortage of stories like this, according to Renata. From the neighbor who, pregnant, on the last day of work before maternity leave, was stuck at the company until they tested everyone after a suspicion to the father of a friend, elderly, who had to stay in a factory during a routine visit to the place.
“The average Chinese say they understand that the government does what’s best for the population, but in my work they’re already starting to question how much the lockdown is costing.”
Over the past two years, those living in China have managed to lead relatively normal lives, with the pandemic under control long before Western nations. With one difference: entering and leaving the country is extremely difficult, with a strict quarantine of at least 14 days, depending on the destination region.
“As we are used to living in a country with so many rules, we respect them. But now we are going to the third year with the country closed. It is an anguish, everyone is kind of freaking out”, says Gláucia Duque, artist and child educator, in China 13 years ago.
Officially, the regime does not talk about adjusting policy until conditions in the country and neighbors improve. “As we move forward with vaccination and technology, like the development of new drugs and vaccines, I think we’ll get to a point where the omicron can become a lighter, less transmissible variant, and then we’ll have the best opportunity. [para abandonar a Covid-zero]”, Liang Wannian, head of the Covid expert committee, told state channel CCTV.
He advocates a “dynamic zero Covid policy”, as he calls the efforts adopted from August 2021, to close neighborhoods or regions before imposing a lockdown on an entire city.
“The most important thing is to minimize the impact of the epidemic on the economy, society, production and people’s lives and balance disease prevention and control with socioeconomic stability,” he wrote in a January article, along with other researchers. , in the Chinese CDC (disease control) weekly.
It is something similar to what is happening today in Shenzhen and Shanghai, the most populous city in the country and another important financial center, which has gradually closed to avoid a complete lockdown.
This Saturday, by the way, even with the number of new diagnoses indicating a new high, to 2,269 (out of a total of 5,600 in the country), the speech remained. “If our city comes to a complete stop, there will be a lot of international cargo ships floating in the port. It would impact the entire national economy as well as the global market,” said Wu Fan, a member of the local task force.
The fight against Covid in Shanghai is led by Zhang Wenhong, a respected scientist in the country. Last year, he took to Weibo, the popular Chinese social network, to say that eventually China should learn to live with the virus. He was heavily attacked by nationalist netizens, who accused him of being carried away by Western ideas and wanting people to die.
The doctor was retaliated against, and Fudan University reopened a plagiarism investigation of his doctoral thesis.
Symbol of the changing winds is that similar comments were made this month by Zeng Guang, a former chief scientist at the Chinese CDC, on the same social network.
He wrote an article advocating that the Covid zero policy cannot “remain unchanged forever” and that “it is humanity’s long-term goal to coexist with the virus”. He further stated that a more effective strategy would involve China developing better messenger RNA vaccines (such as Pfizer’s) or authorizing the application of foreign immunizers. Shortly after, the publication was deleted from the network — and Zeng did not experience anything like the attacks on his colleague.
Meanwhile, Shanghai is slowly closing down, which has displeased many foreigners who live in the cosmopolitan city.
“There are a lot of people leaving because of that, because you can’t go to Brazil and come back easily. People have relatives, friends, and they can’t visit them. A Chinese acquaintance, owner of a Brazilian restaurant, went to open a business in Turkey that didn’t work out and it took 40 days to get back”, says musician Paulo Cesar da Silva, 62, PC Shanghai, who has lived in the country for 23 years.
