In the early hours of last Tuesday (19), Zhiye’s grandmother, 94, was taken from her home. “They broke down our door,” she said. Her uncle called her at 2:47 that day, but her voice was drowned out by the chaos around her.
Zhiye’s uncle, 74, had been locked up at home with his mother since late March due to Covid cases registered at his condominium, Yichuan Sicun, in Shanghai’s Putuo district. On April 13, the two took antigen tests and tested positive. The next day, the neighborhood committee came to run RT-PCR tests, but no results have been reported since.
Relatives sent them cough syrup and fever medicine in case their situation worsened. Fortunately, the two had only a moderate cough, no fever, and, as multiple antigen tests showed, were on the right path to recovery.
First on April 15th, Zhiye’s uncle texted him saying his antigen test was negative. The next day, her grandmother’s antigen test came back weakly positive, and then it was negative the next two days. But on the afternoon of April 18, Zhiye’s uncle said he received a call from the neighborhood committee asking them to prepare to leave immediately for the Putuo temporary treatment center.
Her grandmother has high blood pressure and chronic heart disease, and her uncle had prostate cancer surgery earlier this year and takes medication daily. Given their age and health conditions, Zhiye thought they shouldn’t be taken to a makeshift hospital.
As the latest antigen tests came back negative, she hoped they would be allowed to stay at home. So she wrote an extensive post about what her grandmother went through on an official WeChat account, asking to be exonerated of that decision and for readers to repost her story. It quickly went viral on various social media platforms. But the grandmother was taken anyway.
Amid Shanghai’s worst Covid outbreak ever, elderly residents — especially those with underlying illnesses — have struggled with the reality that they need to be moved to centralized isolation once infected, rather than quarantine at home.
Later, Zhiye learned from her uncle that at 2 am on Tuesday people knocked on her door. Both were sleeping and didn’t answer. “After knocking for some time, they came in by force,” the uncle recalled. Visitors said they would take her grandmother to the hospital, and she refused. So they wrapped her in a blanket and prepared to carry her. In the middle of the argument, the old woman was knocked to the ground.
Fearing for her health, Zhiye’s uncle agreed to go out with people. He helped the mother get dressed, and they left around 3:30 am for the isolation facility at the Taopuzhen Community Health Center in Putuo. The facility was already out of beds, and the two spent the rest of the night sitting in the hallway.
That same night, Zhao Qi, a resident of the Changfeng Xincun residential area in Putuo, was also sent to the isolation center with his 80-year-old mother. On April 8 the antigen test of the two came back positive, and four days later the PCR tests also came back positive.
Over the next few days, they gathered their belongings and waited for the authorities to take them to the temporary treatment center, but the center refused to take them. On April 16, Zhao received a call from the neighborhood committee. “They said that we were too old and that the community facility would not welcome us, so we had to isolate ourselves at home.”
Over the next few days, they stayed at home, took antigen tests daily, and the results were negative. Zhao took pictures of the tests and sent them to the neighborhood committee. But on April 18, new instructions came.
“That afternoon the neighborhood committee called again and told us we should go to a temporary treatment facility. I thought these facilities would be like the ones we saw on television, which were quite acceptable, but I didn’t expect to end up here.”
Zhao told the Caixin agency that he and his mother were boarded the bus at 4 pm and dropped off at the East China Normal University No. 4 isolation center after seven hours of travel.
It was late at night when they arrived. Lin, who was at the same facility, recalled that around 11:30 pm a bus dropped off more than 30 elderly people from Putuo, including Zhan and his mother. Lin found that most of the passengers had underlying health conditions and at least six of them were over 80.
He told Caixin that the center was set up in the school canteen on the second floor. It had about 160 beds, and more than half of the inmates were elderly. The first group, I learned, had been there for a week, and some faced a lack of medication for high blood pressure, diabetes and cardiovascular disease that they took regularly.
Living conditions in the center were basic. In videos Lin took of the facility, several seniors are sitting or lying on simple camp beds. Seeing these conditions, Zhao became worried about his mother. “It takes a lot of rest after getting Covid. I’m very worried about her being sent there. Also, it’s been 11 days since she was infected, and she feels fine. .”
Lin was surprised to see that the facility had no medical equipment and only two professionals on duty. “The isolation facility is sufficient for young people in terms of living conditions, but it is very inconvenient for the elderly, especially as there is no capacity for emergency care here.”
He hoped that the elderly and their relatives could be transferred to a hospital with better emergency care, or another isolation center with better conditions.
In the residential area of Jiangpu Street in the Yangpu district, the fate of Han Lu’s grandmother, 96, has yet to be decided. She has been paralyzed and bed-bound for years and cannot take care of herself. She is constantly attended by two caregivers and is totally dependent on them for food; each meal takes an hour to finish.
Han’s grandmother caught the virus from her caregiver. On April 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called the family and informed them of the infection. After learning of her condition, the team told them she could stay home to recover.
But on April 17, the neighborhood committee said Han’s grandmother needed to go to a community facility to recover. Since April 18, Han has approached the committee several times, reporting on her grandmother’s condition and hoping that they would give her financial help to stay home, but the committee never gave a clear answer.
After reading Zhiye’s story, Han became even more anxious. “I sincerely hope that the authorities will know my grandmother’s true condition and difficulties and will be more humane, allowing her to stay at home.”
