In early 2020, when it became clear that Covid-19 would be a serious crisis that would bring problems to health systems around the world, dancer Fabiane Fonseca, now 35, says she did not feel afraid because she was at the epicenter. of the epidemic, China, where he has lived for six years. “The security protocol was strict, but it was always very functional, and in the end I felt safe,” she says.
Just over two years later, banned for over a month from leaving home in Shanghai, the country’s financial hub, the impression has changed.
“This year was a shock. We already knew what the ‘Covid zero’ policy was like, we already saw lockdowns happening since last year in other cities, but until then it was a 14-day quarantine. , we never imagined it would get to this point”, he says, referring to the extension of the measure and the sending of contaminated people to confinement centers far from home.
First, they announced that the region where Fabiane lived would be closed for 48 hours, which went on for another 48 hours, and then 5 days, “now we’ve been under a kind of house arrest for over a month, in which I don’t even go down in the outside area of ​​my condo except to do a Covid test.”
The omicron variant of the coronavirus, much more contagious, pierced the rigid barriers that China built against the disease, which, with ‘Covid zero’, made it difficult to enter the country, imposed mass tests and managed to eliminate contamination. Now, the regime is doubling down on the measure, amid protests from the population, at a time when Shanghai has become the center of the country’s crisis. On April 18, the city recorded its first Covid-19 deaths in two years. Today there are 490, 16 of them this Tuesday (3).
Since March 10 without work, as the dance shows are suspended, Fabiane reports that she had to rely on the understanding of the owner of the apartment where she lives to postpone paying the rent, which costs about R$4,000. “I had some reservations, but the situation is very difficult, very unstable, very uncertain.”
She says that she has not received any aid from the government and that even the food baskets distributed in the city rarely arrived in the most remote neighborhoods, like hers, and most of them were concentrated at the beginning of the quarantine. “The price of things has doubled, and we can only shop in huge quantities, in large groups.”
Today, she is trying to save money to leave the country, which she hopes will happen by the end of the year. A pity, she says, because she says she found in China a place where her work as a dancer is more valued than in Brazil — a situation that changed over the course of the pandemic, in her view, after China controlled the disease while other countries in the world faced deadly outbreaks.
“The prejudice against foreigners has grown a lot here too. They always asked my nationality, it became more difficult to get work. The prejudice that other countries registered with Chinese at the beginning of the pandemic also happened in China with foreigners”, he says.
The desire to leave the country after the strict quarantine is shared by other foreigners, in a movement that has accelerated now, but that was already underway throughout the pandemic – in 2021, the city was a legal residence for 164,000 foreigners, against 215. thousand in 2018.
Frustration hits even those who just arrived. A Brazilian who asked not to be identified for fear of facing difficulties with local authorities told Sheet who has been stuck at home for more than two months, with his wife and two small children, because he has accumulated two quarantines, with a small break between them.
First, when he arrived in the country, where he went to work as an engineer for a European company, at the end of February. At the time, he had to fulfill a 21-day quarantine, mandatory for anyone arriving from abroad.
Then he had less than a week of freedom, when he was able to move around the city without restrictions, until Shanghai went into lockdown in early April. In that period, he says he has spent more than 12,000 yuan (about R$9,000) just to buy food, and is now struggling to distract his children, aged 4 and 7, who are stuck at home.
On Sunday, the city administration began allowing residents of five of the 16 districts, where about a fifth of the population lives, to leave briefly, which filled the few markets open to the public.
Other cities also tighten restrictions. This Tuesday, Zhengzhou, in the central region of the country, where 12.6 million people live, announced restrictions from May 4 to 10. The capital, Beijing, has also increased restrictions, and announced that schools will be closed for another week. In addition, anyone who wants to enter or leave the city will need to present a Covid test with a negative result performed less than 48 hours ago.
