If I’ve been non-chalant about the current lockdown occurring around China, I’ll be getting a little more suspicious. Why?
In case you aren’t following the news, the city of WuHan, in central China, has been locked down because of an outbreak of the Coronavirus, an infectious and deadly disease that has so far claimed the lives of about 1000 people. Since then, Spring Festival (when Chinese people celebrate the lunar new year) has come and gone despite the official “holiday” being extended a couple of times, to February 3rd and then February 10th. Now people are beginning to return to the cities where they work, including places such as Beijing.
Although I’m not alarmed by this return of workers, even if there are confirmed cases of the Coronavirus around my neighbourhood, it seems that the government isn’t taking any chances. And that’s where these lockdowns are coming into play.
What are these lockdowns?
You’ll recall that a few weeks ago I mentioned the presence of “guards” of a sort (not really authority-enforcing guards) posting up at the entrance of each compound. Their job was to check the temperature of each person as they came and went into the compound. My compound already has guards so now it’s part of their duty to check everybody’s temperatures.
In addition to these temperature checks, they stopped delivery people from going into the compounds (not a bad thing, I’d imagine, since a lot of these folks are, well, not very hygienic given their work schedules) and now people have to go pick up their deliveries at the front gate.
Ah yes, and the side gates have been closed. I did forget to mention that. That happened a couple of weeks ago, just after the real Spring Festival ended on around January 31st.
There were several notices of what to do and what not to do, especially in regard to hygiene. I’ve seen a lot more advertisements on TV here telling people what to eat, how to wash their hands, to wear a mask, among other efforts to restrict the movement of germs. You’d think this would be common knowledge but this is kind of where China still gets to call themselves a “developing nation”.
Among the notices sent out were a general notification of self-quarantine for 14 days, wash your hands and stay away from crowds and people who are coughing:
And last week they sent out notices to all of us “foreign friends” who are still in Beijing notifying us of the situation and informing us where we can go if we need help.
And then they attached a long list of hospitals and clinics in Beijing that can take Coronavirus-infected people.
But all of those efforts didn’t seem to be enough. Just yesterday, February 12th, a new notice went up. It seems that they haven’t been able to control the spread of people enough and so now all residents have to go register at the front gate in order to get an “exit pass”.
What was surprising was that people actually stood far apart from each other, something that doesn’t normally happen in China:
I heard of these passes being distributed in other areas starting last week, no doubt in other communities that have a larger Chinese residence rather than foreign presence. And their apartments probably also cost less. So it seems that my compound is one of the last few places that are instantiating this control measure in an effort to stymie the spread of this virus.
I sure hope this wasn’t in response to whatever happened that brought an ambulance on the compound a couple of nights ago.
And then just last night there was a massive jump in the number of cases reported, no doubt because the makeshift hospitals in WuHan went fully online and people also started returning to work in cities that have these facilities.
So it doesn’t look like things are going to calm down any time soon. It doesn’t help that there are several news stories out there pointing out the suspicious origin of this virus, notably how it originated in WuHan near a high level virology lab. But, my question is, wouldn’t it make sense for a virology lab to be near where there would be the greatest number of samples? I couldn’t say for sure. Anyway, that’s something we’ll probably never learn for sure, although I’m sure many people will keep looking.