Lockdown, Part 2

By the next day the Ayi was due to come home, but in theory, there was still a risk as to whether she might be infected but not yet showing. Which meant the obvious thing to do (in our house at least) was to rent a second apartment across the road and put her in quarantine. She was slightly bemused by this, but accepted with good grace on the basis that she was being paid to sit and watch television every day; eventually I negotiated that it would at least be safe for her to do our washing and ironing, and I bravely ventured across the street every day to drop off our dirty clothes and pick up the clean ones. Meanwhile, we were all at home for the full day; Keira’s kindergarten, along with all schools in the city, had been shut for yet a further two weeks, and the public holiday for Spring Festival had been extended twice until it totalled a generous 17 days. Heidi and I were both doing some work from home and juggling looking after Keira, and more importantly, trying to keep her amused as she showed frustration at not being allowed outside or running around save for her usual jumping around in the apartment.

As the days progresses. I got used to sitting on our balcony to get some fresh air, looking wistfully at the cavalier people who were walking outside, or, shock horror, hitting balls on the tennis courts nearby. Out! In public! Wondering how long this was all going to go on for, one of the biggest risks now to Chinese society was that you were going to have 1.4 billion very bored people; there is only so long you can keep everyone shut in before tension starts to build. Whilst talking online about an entirely different subject, someone asked me for a musical suggestion, and the only song that I could think of was Morrissey’s “Every Day is Like Sunday,” because, well, it was. Many of the population need to be out earning a living, and with the whole economy seemingly on pause, this was going to bite.

I continued to find excuses to go out every day, even when it meant taking a long list of requirements to the supermarket on the basis that no-one had ordered online that day. I kept my distance from anyone, no touching or handshakes or high-fives or (as I said to Heidi in a moment of bitter sarcasm) illicit sex in the supermarket back aisles. In fact, the only moment I was annoyed and shocked by someone’s behaviour given the situation was when I left our apartment and saw some used masks left behind on the windowsill in the corridor. I did not know whose they were, why they were there, or how long they had been there, but this was distinctly unsociable behaviour. The last thing anyone should be asking is for someone else to dispose of their masks, especially when that person was unknown to them. I decided I better get rid of them before Keira found them, I picked them up using a reversed plastic bag, avoided touching them directly myself, and treated them with disdain like they were a combination of Keira’s used nappies and nuclear waste.

The number of cases kept rising every day, overtaking SARS, and other countries started taking more and more severe action on China. British Airways suspended all their flights with China, and my flight to the wedding was cancelled a few days later. I grudgingly sent out the emails to the bride and to the family saying I could not make it; no-one was surprised, but it was still very disappointing.

The same day British Airways stopped their flights, another announcement from the UK caught me the hardest. This time the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, advised British citizens in China to leave as soon as they can; the context was that he worried that there may be a further lockdown, and so people should get out ‘sooner rather than later’, but even so it was a sobering message, and caused a lot of discussion between my friends and myself as to whether we should leave. The general feeling was not yet. This was an over-reaction in response to criticism that the British Government had been slow to react to the issue of British in Wuhan, being well behind other governments’ efforts to repatriate their citizens. We all hung on a bit longer, but it was another negative sign that the situation was sliding further out of control.

By this time, the Ayi had served out her quarantine across the road and had come back to live with us. I wondered about broaching the subject of whether this meant that Waigong could/would go home, given that now the Ayi had resumed cooking and cleaning duties, he was now not doing much every day except pacing the flat, squirting alcohol cleanser on anything that moved, and a fair few things that did not. He put so much on the soles of our shoes that he burned the floor. Before I could say anything though, Heidi admitted that she had already booked him a ticket to go home; however, it then transpired that Zunyi, despite only a handful of its own cases, had initiated its own lockdown policy, and anyone coming in from outside was required to sit in quarantine for 14 days. Waigong naturally did not fancy this, so in a situation that frankly suited nobody, he would stay with us indefinitely.

As ever, rumours continued to proliferate on social media as to what was going on, and more urgently, what was going to happen next. There were stories of buildings in China using police tape to close the doors so as to not let anyone in, and another that more cities were going to initiate severe curfews, such as only allowing citizens out of their buildings once every two days to buy food. I found the former an unlikely story — after all everyone must eat — but the second caught me off guard, particularly because one of the cities mentioned was Hangzhou, which in China-terms is just down the road from Shanghai, and whatever issues they may have would likely be here soon also. If that did happen, then we were verging on Walking Dead scenarios and that for me would signal time to either start eating instant noodles, or more preferably hot foot it back to London for an indefinite break and a spot of my Mum’s home cooking, if I could get a flight that was.

Clearly unaware of how things were going to progress — much like everyone else, seemingly including those who really should have done — it occurred to me that if such a situation had happened in the UK, then I would expect (or at least hope) that a Blitz spirit would evolve, that everyone would band together to beat the unbeatable. Keep Calm And Carry On as the sign says. Maybe in these social media-driven days, that is not so easy to pull off — I noted with disdain the stories of stereotypical racism against Asian people in the UK when the virus broke out, i.e., ‘you’re from Asia, so you might make me sick’ cases. But I would hope that the wider spirit would indeed prevail. Back then, I did not feel that happening on the ground in China; everyone was retreating to their own apartments and cutting off their ties with the outside world, not relying on them. The fact that the above rumour about taping up buildings was even going around — and Heidi told it to me with a look on her face like she believed it — saw society moving in exactly the opposite direction [this was long before it was tragically proven to be true when people died in a fire in Xinjiang because they were locked in their building]. At least this happens with people out of each other’s way; what would happen if you combined that level of worry and avoidance with enforced circulation of people, such as if everyone was shortly going to be required to go back to work? Social breakdown and mob rule were not so far down the line.

My other big scare came when I woke up one morning with a runny nose and a headache. Surely not? I kept my distance from everyone and swallowed a bunch of cold medicine before doing some surreptitious googling of symptoms. I am not sure what I was more afraid of; that I might have the virus and the impact that would have on my health, or the embarrassment of having caught something whilst being considerably more relaxed about the whole situation than those around me. The ‘I told you so’s’ would have lasted for years. Thankfully a quick update on the virus was quite reassuring — the early strain Coronavirus was a viral-based infection that affected the chest and lungs, whilst a cold is a bacterial-driven infection in the nasal passages. The virus’s symptoms were coughing, sore throat, and lethargy, but a runny nose was not one of them. Given the difference in the two diseases, having a runny nose is a sign that you do not have the virus, as it cannot be caused by it (at least until the Omicron variant came along a year later). I relaxed at this, and after another cold tablet or two I was feeling fine again. I kept washing my hands anyway and did a lot of deep breathing before re-joining the fray.

And it began to feel more like a fray; or at least my nerves were frayed. Cabin Fever started to set in, as I looked out of the window more and more desperately every morning. We have a big apartment, but even so, four adults and one child is still a decent-sized population in any flat, and we started getting under each other’s feet. Waigong had nothing to do except either walk around the apartment spraying alcohol on every surface he could find or sing along to songs on his iPhone, neither of which were particularly helpful to everyone else; and I bit back at Heidi when she chided me for opening the door to a delivery driver rather than waiting for him to deposit his goods and then leave as she was encouraging everyone to do lest we actually come within a metre of another living human. If the virus, now specifically named Covid-19 (a better name than the suggested SARS 2), did follow the SARS path, and there was no reason to think it would not, given the speed that cases were still increasing (and had now overtaken SARS in the number of deaths, let alone cases which by now were above 40,000), then it meant we could all be here for a lot longer yet. There is always someone worse than yourself though: I pitied the holidaymakers caught on a cruise liner with a couple of infections, they were all confined to their cabins for two weeks without being even being able to walk outside. Cruise cabins are not very big at the best of times, and some have no windows or natural light. I have to say if that was me I would likely end up taking my chances with the virus and making a run for it; claustrophobia and isolation are not welcome bedfellows.

The situation called to mind a quote I had heard in relation to the (excellent) television series Chernobyl; that the nuclear disaster there was something that could only have happened in the USSR, and that it could only have been solved in the USSR. Substitute Communist USSR for Communist-ish China and the same applied here. The perfect storm combination of risky food containment practices with a huge population that all went on the move at the same time was a uniquely Chinese situation; but then to lockdown 1.4 billion people, stop people from going home for weeks on end, and to pay no attention to personal rights or the economy in order to bring things under control, was again something that only China could pull off, as evidenced by the slower reactions and the much longer problems with the disease experienced when the disease hit the West. Whenever the WHO issued briefings about the global spread of the virus, they were also quick to praise China’s actions, on the basis that they knew they would never be able to replicate anything so drastic anywhere else.

Because the other aspect in China was that everyone just accepted the situation and went along with it. How do you work from home? With kids in tow? Without any opportunity to arrange extra childcare? If you work in an essential industry, do you take your kids with you? Why put yourself in quarantine even if you have not been anywhere infected? And what do you do in quarantine anyway? Why take everyone’s temperature every five minutes when most cases are asymptomatic? All these valid questions were asked and debated when the lockdown hit the West, but as far as I could see in China, they were just ignored; everyone just did what they were told. When the compounds started temperature checking, everyone went along with it. When they stopped allowing delivery drivers into the compounds, meaning that you had to walk to the front gate every time something was delivered, off everyone went. Weeks at home and no-one was protesting in the street or screaming abuse at the police if they were told to turn around; people just went along with decisions that were being made from the top-down, and the public had to follow them, regardless of personal inconvenience or cost. There was no #I’mdone trending on WeChat. Certainly, no-one was protesting in the street about having to wear a mask. But then it worked better that way, so what was the right answer?

Generally in life, I like to think of myself as a glass half-full, reasonably optimistic person. I look for the best in situations. What were the silver linings here? Well I suppose the main one is that Heidi and I both got to spend a lot more time with Keira. Between the initial holiday and then the shut-in period, with her not having any school, we were there at home with her every day for a fair few weeks. Keira and I built a Lego version of Elsa’s ice castle, did some science experiments, and I started trying to teach her to read. A couple of new letters every day, just trying to get her onto the right path. Her school provided her with some learning to do at home every day, which I tried to participate in and help her with. Then, in a new move for us both, we baked a cake together; the presentation was a little lacking, but it hit the spot if I do say so myself, and I was quite happy with it. Baking was a popular enough activity that we made another one the next day, and even a third a few days later. And, maybe less worthwhile, I introduced her to the world of Scooby Doo, which she seemed to like quite a lot; and also the Despicable Me films along with the Minions, which she thought were funny, and I liked listening to the soundtracks to. Despicable Me 3 in particular was responsible for Keira learning who Michael Jackson was. Keira became more and more used to having both Heidi and I around during the day, and interacting with us both a lot more than would normally be possible. We could work on her behavioural learning, trying to iron out one or two bad habits that I was not over-impressed had crept into her personality. But more than anything, just spend time together and put down more roots in our relationship. As silver linings go, it was a pretty good one.

Building a bedroom fort

What else? I did a lot of fitness work, streaming videos at home and/or doing exercises on the balcony. I had been injured before Christmas playing football, and this helped give me a chance to do the rehab work I needed to do to get back up to speed, which I would like to think that I did, even if I could not put it to the test. Certainly I did not put any weight on over the period, which has to be some kind of win, particularly with the number of self-made cakes I ended up eating. I read a few books, caught up with some of the Oscar-nominated films for the year when I had the chance late at night, and listened to some new music. And, on occasion, sat on the balcony looking out at the crazy world that was going on around us, trying some sort of reflection and then appreciation of what we had and that we were still in one piece. Not easy, but important to try.

After around six weeks at home, be it holiday or home working, I finally got the nod that our company was going back into the office. Heidi had a few more days, and then her company were venturing in too. There were still many new cases being announced every day, but the numbers were slowing compared to before, which we were hoping meant that there may be a turning point around the corner.

It made for a strange sensation leaving home in the morning and then travelling on a commute that was much shorter than before as there was still much less traffic than usual. Our office block was quiet as we were the first company back, meaning that it was actually as safe as anywhere could be — it had sat empty for a month and there were still barely any people in it now. I had my temperature taken whenever going in or out, and had to wear a mask on the way in, but that aside we were allowed to just get on with what we were doing.

After a morning of welcome distraction on my first day, I went out to get some lunch. Our office location is not ideal in terms of having many services around it, but there were still a few places nearby, and after a month of Chinese home cooking, I was sorely in need of some western food. However, when I reached a burger place nearby, it was shut. I continued across the road, and another favourite restaurant was also closed until further notice as was the one next to it, and the Japanese place a bit further down. I noticed an international chain hotel a bit further along, I reasoned that they would still be functioning, and I had a chance of meeting my craving for a pizza there. They were not, and I did not. Restaurants were not open to eat in under any circumstances yet, and I trudged back to the office hungry, on the way ordering a delivery and hoping it would be quick to arrive.

Days were now turning to weeks. In China at least, the number of cases started to flatten out, but things were still moving slowly; for instance, there were whispers of the schools not going back for another six weeks after. Having said that, something major did happen: Waigong went home. Realising that if he was going to sit at home all day with us he might as well do it in Guizhou and qualify for quarantine, and to be fair to him, anxious to then offer his services to work at his local hospital, he packed up and I accompanied him to an unsurprisingly quiet airport. If he thought he might be risking his life to travel home to a plague-infested Zombieland, he did not show it and strolled away, characteristically swathed in facemask and plastic gloves.

And the number of cases in China was indeed starting to fall. Putting aside the horrendous situation in Wuhan and Hubei, which was still racking up many hundreds of cases a day, the rest of China was down to low single figures daily. Shanghai had a couple of days without any new cases, and I started to dare to look out of the window again. The trouble was, the cases were now springing up elsewhere. Italy had hundreds, there were cases in a hotel in Tenerife, and there was such an outbreak in Iran that the Deputy Health Minister caught it. There were even rumours around the Pope. We now had an ironic situation approaching. The border closedown was being enforced not to keep infected people inside China to protect the world, but to keep them out to protect China.

More weeks went by, and the number of domestic cases not only levelled, but started to fall, even in Wuhan. It was the case that pretty much all the new cases were from overseas travellers coming into the country, and those border controls became significantly tougher. Every single passenger coming into the country was subject to a health check, and given a code of green / yellow / red, depending on their symptoms, temperature, and where they had come in from. Green meant you had to quarantine at home for two weeks and were driven there on a special government bus, before being walked to your door, along with your compound security, who were instructed to keep you there. Yellow meant potential of infection, and you were carted off to a government-nominated hotel to sit in a hotel room for two weeks. No leaving, no going out, and you had to pay the bill. I do not think the Mandarin Oriental or the Hyatt were on the approved hotel list. And if you were red? Well that meant you already had it, and you probably had had it then because you were off to hospital before your feet could touch the ground. Whether you might ever be seen again was a matter of some conjecture.

Back at our place, I was avidly watching the numbers to see if we would get the all-clear. Keira’s enthusiasm for cake-making had got to the point that the main threat to my health was diabetes from all the sugar I was digesting — Keira, surprisingly, seemed far more interested in making the cakes than actually eating them. Unlike myself; after all waste not, want not. My next biggest health risk though was death by blunt instrument from Heidi if I ever actually did contract the virus and brought it into the house, I was far more worried about her reaction than I was about what the virus would do me. We were both working in the office every day, I started up some casual football again, and there was even an edict that masks were becoming optional outside. That said, in truth 99% of people were still wearing them; one day I left work to go out for lunch, and in doing so, dropped my mask. I was then caught outside without one and felt like some sort of criminal, trying not to be spotted, just lurking in the shadows. I covered my face as I entered the restaurant and ordered before anyone could query my being there. After I had eaten, I scurried back to the office as quickly as possible and resolved to always hold a spare mask with me just in case. That day aside, being outside was becoming easier, and one Saturday, the sun came out; the weather was the best it had been for months, and we joined what seemed like the rest of the city in going to the park to enjoy some new-found freedom. Of course exhibiting social distancing whilst we did so.

Disappointingly, given that it was clear that travellers now provided the main risk for the virus, for the first time in all my time in China I started to experience racism aimed at me. I was in a shop, wearing a mask as well, when the shopkeeper stopped serving me to ask where I was from, and more importantly, when I had come to Shanghai. When I replied, in Mandarin, that I had lived in the city for 11 years and had been in the city since January, she carried on, but if I had not been able to reply to her or come up with a sufficient answer, I could have seen myself being turfed out pretty quickly. My next taxi driver also wanted me to confirm how long I had been in the city before he would let me in the car. My other western friends all reported similar experiences. And then from a wider aspect, that same day, the Government laid down a rule that all foreigners were now barred from entering the country. It did not matter if you had a visa, a business in China, a family there, or somewhere quiet to sit out your two-week quarantine, the gates were closed. I am not sure what they were trying to achieve by this, given that 90% of the travellers’ cases were from Chinese returning home, and so the foreigners’ number was barely a handful of cases a day, but discourse and opinion on this was not encouraged. My fear was that this would further stir anti-foreigner sentiment, with the Government using Orwellian tactics to create an enemy in the public’s eyes to draw their ire, away from the difficulties that the Government was imposing on their daily life. 11 years in the country, during which time I had contributed a fair whack of tax for the greater good let us not forget, but it was the first time I did not feel welcome.

Strangely though, in terms of the progress of the virus itself, I was more worried at this point than I had been earlier. Not for us at home, but before everyone I knew back in the UK, which had now gone into full lockdown in the same way that we had done two months before. The difference here was that I still read the UK press every day and was seeing the full brunt of the impact, along with many an opinion piece saying the Government was right / the Government was wrong / it could go on for months / it could be all over next week / won’t someone please think of the children. In contrast, when it happened to us, all the press was in Chinese, making it much easier for me to just ignore it. It did also occur to me that there were a fair few people in the UK looking for sympathy and taking the shutdown hard when they had paid little attention nor empathised in any way with us in China when we had the same happen first. But such is life. I made sure to speak to my family regularly and submit recommendations for TV viewing now that my parents’ usually hectic social life was curtailed. It became more important to call them regularly as they were now in lockdown and needed the contact even more than we did. As we started venturing out, I continued my normal habit of sending photos of Keira as she ran around or jumped off stuff, but felt a bit guilty in doing so as it showed us moving (mostly) freely outside again, compared to Europe now being in shutdown — not least then because their lockdown lasted far, far longer than ours did.

This in turn gave a fair pause for thought about which country had initiated the best strategy to contain the virus. Singapore and South Korea had both been credit with aggressive testing and tracking strategies without resorting to the full lockdown (although they both had wobbles during later waves). In China, even now things were relaxing; I still had my temperature taken every time I entered a new building, be it an office, restaurant (now open again), or home. I am not sure that these were 100% accurate — on one same day in two different buildings I recorded two temperatures of 37.3 degrees (high, on the verge of causing alarm, the security guard looked quite nervous letting me in) and 34.6 degrees (ice cold, possibly dead) — but still the constant checking meant that if anyone was sick, it would be much harder for them to spread the virus further, and they would be rapidly contained. Both the UK and the USA early on seemed reluctant to test people for the virus, either for ethical reasons, or more likely that they did not have enough kits; given that they had had a two-month lead time to prepare before getting the full brunt of the impact, that was unforgivable. I saw the case numbers in the USA reach 85,000 and in doing so, surpass China, which when you consider the US were only testing sick people and not those who might be asymptomatic, made me dread to think what the real number might be. When the US death toll, not just the number of cases, went past 100,000, it became clear that real number was very high indeed.

Over the time that I have written and re-written this chapter, the only certainty has been that the short-term situation remains uncertain. Will Covid be like SARS and burn out, never to return, or are we stuck with this for years until the holy grail of vaccines banish it to history in the same way as smallpox and polio? The former seems less and less likely to be the case, especially now we are seeing all different variants, but at least now the vaccines are working; however, the logistics of re-vaccinating hundreds of millions of people year after year remains unsurprisingly challenging. In a reverse of the earlier situations, vaccines were the one aspect the West did lead on, with China being comparatively slower to vaccinate its population. And me. I eventually did have my shots in Shanghai, once foreigners qualified (the bulk of the local population were vaccinated first.) The drive to push the vaccine started accelerating, as noticed when ‘vaccine buses’, portable vaccine centres, started popping up at shopping centres across Shanghai. But then 1.4 billion people does mean a lot of needles are needed. Syringe production would have been a good business to get into a few months ago.

In the end Covid spread around the world and everyone experienced it, often far worse than we did, but for the first two months Heidi and I were both living through our second pandemic in a generation; if there is a third, do I get a medal for a hattrick? Or is it going to be third time unlucky? These two cases happened 17 years apart, I would not mind betting that it will not be 17 years before another one happens. (I was right: it was 2 years. D’oh.) Will I get caught again? And worse, will I catch in next time? Both times I have been at the centre of (at least initially) the worst place to be, so maybe one day my luck will indeed run out.