In Beijing, Covid Zero Can Unexpectedly Ruin Your Weekend

In Beijing, Covid Zero Can Unexpectedly Ruin Your Weekend

An employee disinfects an escalator at a shopping mall in Beijing, China, on Sunday, June 19, 2022.

Hi, John here in Beijing, where China’s approach to controlling Covid has made once innocuous activities surprisingly risky. I, for example, ran into some trouble recently because of a cold beer on a balmy summer night. But first…

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When a cold beer with friends ruins your weekend

Two-and-a-half years into the pandemic, many countries have begun reopening their borders, rolling back restrictions and living with the virus. Not China, where the rules remain as tight as ever, and in some instances, have gotten even more restrictive.

These are conditions I can attest to. Two Fridays ago, I got a text message at 6 p.m. from Beijing’s city government saying I’d visited a location where I could have been exposed to Covid-19.

The first thing I did was to check my Beijing Health Kit, the mobile-phone app the city uses for contact tracing. To go anywhere in the Chinese capital these days, be it a restaurant, office building or public park, you have to show that you’re color-coded green on the app. I was no longer green.

What the app showed instead was a pop-up window instructing me to report to my neighborhood committee – small government offices that oversee a few city blocks each. A pop-up like the one I had gets you barred from everything.

Early Saturday morning at my neighborhood committee, I learned that I’d been flagged for visiting the China World Mall on June 8. Yes, I confessed, I was there that evening having a few beers with some friends. Turns out someone who later tested positive for Covid had been there too – not at the bar where I was, but somewhere in the mall.

The China World Mall is gigantic. It has 230,000 square meters of floor space – more than Grand Central Station in New York – and is home to some 400 stores. But in much of China these days, proximity is in the eye of the beholder.

I was ordered to stay home until a nurse came to my apartment to conduct a PCR test. When the results showed I was virus free, I’d be allowed to go outside. The pop-up window on my Health Kit, though, would stay until I passed a second test on Monday.

It could have been worse. I was never told how close I was to the China World Mall visitor who tested positive, but thankfully it wasn’t near enough to label me a close contact. Those unfortunate folks risk being taken off to quarantine hotels.

Aside from being cooped up at home for a few days, my life was fine. The problem, though, is that my story is increasingly common. (As I write this, two of my colleagues in Beijing sit in quarantine.) Facing far more transmissible variants and an insistence on rooting out every case, local officials have little choice but to cast a wide net for potential infections.

One ruined weekend for me is no big deal for the broader economy or daily life – I’m not a big spender to begin with - but multiplied many times over across China, the financial and social implications get very large, very quick. — John Liu

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