“We would rather let the economy suffer a little for a while, than risk people’s security of life and physical health, especially children and the elderly,” said President Xi Jinping during a visit to Wuhan on Thursday. Just a day later, two cases of infection were registered in the city, Bloomberg writes. – Our country has a large population. Strategies such as “herd immunity” would lead to unimaginable consequences, Xi said according to the Xinhua news agency. In Wuhan’s neighboring province, Anhui, a major outbreak is taking place. On Friday, 107 cases of infection were registered. With that, several cities have been shut down, just a few months after the major shutdowns in Shanghai and Beijing. REOPENING: People are dancing in a nightclub in Shanghai for the first time in several months, after the big closure in April and May. Photo: HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP – A lot of uncertainty On Thursday, restaurants, bars and nightclubs in the city of Shanghai opened for the first time in over three months. From the end of March to the end of May, large parts of the city were closed down. The authorities would overcome the biggest outbreak in China since the beginning of the pandemic. The continuous transition from reopening to shutting down is tiring, “Carter” admits. Carter has asked to be referred to by another name for fear of persecution by Chinese authorities. VIEW: This is what it looked like outside Carter’s window during the shutdown in Shanghai. Photo: Private – The authorities tell us nothing, so there is a lot of uncertainty, says the young Shanghai resident to news. ROUTINE: The test queue outside Carter’s home in Shanghai during the shutdown. Photo: Private A hard everyday life Carter spent large parts of the spring locked inside the dormitory. He is very critical of the government’s hard line. – Of course, shutting down is not so much fun. Luckily I was able to work from home, but one of my roommates did not have that opportunity. After a while, he started going crazy, he says. EXPENSIVE: A bunch of vegetables that cost around 2500 kroner during the closure in Shanghai. Photo: Private In addition, he tells of a daily routine that involved waking up early to order food on various mobile apps: – Every day we were unsure if we would have ordered enough food. We competed with all the others, several million with people who also tried to get ordered. We just tapped and tapped the screen to be the fastest. It was generally very difficult to get hold of things, such as medicines. – China itself experiences that they have handled the pandemic very well Western countries mostly seem to have finished with the pandemic. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people are again subject to strict curfews, mass testing and infection tracing in China. But why does China doubt this zero-covid strategy? – China generally has an extremely strict infection control system. Partly because they have had bad experiences before, but also because China is a very large country with a high degree of mobility. People are constantly moving across the country, explains China expert Hans Jørgen Gåsemyr. Hans Jørgen Gåsemyr is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Policy, and is an expert on Chinese politics and society. Photo: Christopher Olssøn / Christopher Olssøn – So if the infection spreads, it can have a very large extent of damage, the researcher points out. Another part of the explanation is related to prestige. From a Chinese perspective, the handling of the pandemic has been a success: – China itself experiences that they have handled the pandemic very well in the last two and a half years. While other parts of the world have been closed for long periods, China has been able to keep society very open, says Gåsemyr. – There is a lot of prestige in showing this, he emphasizes.
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– There is a lot of uncertainty – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
