The leadership team insisted for two days that Shanghai wouldn’t be locked down, that Shanghai was important. But in the end, facing the reality or to preserve their own prestige, they came up with a strategy of closing across the Huangpu River first for a period of time, and then locking down this side of the river.

Lockdown

Growing up, I experienced the SARS epidemic and have very little memory of it. After seeing related materials, it ended because its incubation period was short and there wasn’t a nationwide spread yet. I remember being in primary school back then, with classes ending early every day, and the smell of disinfectant always lingering in the air.

Since the end of 2019, COVID-19 has been raging for almost three years. Workers who travel abroad have become accustomed to it, wearing masks when they need to. The recent wave of outbreaks in Shanghai has repeatedly fluctuated, originating from Hong Kong and then spreading across the border into Shenzhen, and here in Shanghai was due to a surge of imported cases from Hong Kong. The official announcement stated that the spread of the epidemic was caused by inadequate protection measures at quarantine hotels, and the mutated virus had reduced its toxicity but increased its transmission speed through ventilation systems in hotels. Initially, it wasn’t very serious and could be contained.

People are often confident. Shanghai’s leaders were like that too. They would choose to implement grid-based risk control with us for precise containment.

Lockdown

As you can all see from the results, the new cases have already exceeded 20,000, leaving us with no choice but to implement a lockdown. Notably, it didn’t use the word “lockdown” externally, as it had previously stated during a press conference that Shanghai did not need a lockdown, in order to preserve its last shred of face.

Grocery Shopping

The delivery industry is a new emerging sector driven by the internet. The core of it relies on someone delivering groceries for you, right? However, due to widespread lockdowns in many areas during the pandemic, merchants could operate but no one was available to deliver, which removed the final link in the chain. People outside of this may not fully understand – how could a cosmopolitan metropolis like Shanghai, with its residents going everywhere, all rush out to buy groceries together en masse? In reality, most people are also migrant workers who come here to work and live in rented apartments, typically eating at company canteens or restaurants, rarely cooking at home. When this route becomes blocked, those with the means will start buying groceries. Because this lockdown announcement was not made in advance, people didn’t have much food or vegetables stored up, which led to the chaotic rush to buy groceries seen in the video. In that situation, gathering together directly resulted in a resurgence of the epidemic.

Industry

All of us are working in the IT industry. I experienced the impact of the pandemic, getting a taste of remote work. Back in 2019, I stayed at home for almost a month, changing my train tickets back and forth ten times, with no certainty about when I would be able to return to Shenzhen. I can’t even imagine how those people in the catering, tourism, or many service industries have been getting by these past few years.