The "Lying-Down Lockdown": When Innocent Residents Are Sealed In Because of Neighbors
First, let me explain the meaning of the term I coin in this article, the "lying-down lockdown" (tangfeng). A popular expression these days is "taking a shot while lying down," meaning an innocent person gets hit by a bullet they never deserved. By the "lying-down lockdown," I mean an innocent resident being put under lockdown while going about their own life, simply because someone else in the community has an abnormal nucleic-acid test result.Let me use my own residential compound as an example. Our compound has three buildings: a south building, a north building, and a middle building. The south and middle buildings have no subdivided units, while the north building is divided into three units. The south building houses over a thousand people; each unit of the north building also holds more than a thousand, and the middle building probably holds between 1,500 and 2,000 people. Over the past week, the middle building reported two confirmed cases and was formally locked down. The north building's three units were temporarily locked down twice for Unit 1, once each for Units 2 and 3, and the south building was temporarily locked down three times.That is to say, over the past week there were six temporary lockdowns in total, plus the formal lockdown of the middle building, which has not yet been lifted. A lockdown does not affect just one building or one unit, because many work units, in order to fulfill their "four-party responsibilities," require employees to report the situation of their whole community—not merely their own unit or building. As a result, every formal or temporary lockdown basically affects everyone in the compound.Moreover, the buildings and units in the same compound stand very close together. The three buildings share one small garden, and children from all three buildings play in that same garden every day. So as soon as a lockdown occurs, the residents themselves become afraid, and the great majority of them dare not go out.Every temporary lockdown was triggered by residents of a building getting a "ten-in-one" pooled positive sample at a nearby nucleic-acid testing site. Each temporary lockdown lasted roughly ten-plus hours. Sometimes people were locked down around five or six in the evening and released by seven or eight in the morning; sometimes they were locked down around seven or eight in the evening and released at noon or one or two in the afternoon.Looked at in isolation, this might seem to affect only one residential compound, but that is not the case. All seven of our compound's temporary lockdowns were eventually lifted, which means the positive carriers in those seven pooled samples were not from our compound at all but from other compounds. Nowadays nucleic-acid testing is done by mixing residents from many compounds together; each tube may contain people from several compounds. Seen this way, residents of the other compounds involved in those positive tubes have been going through exactly the same experience as we have.Each positive tube involves as few as one and as many as ten compounds. Our compound has only three or four thousand people, but some of the larger compounds nearby have far more than that. Even if we assume an average of only three thousand people per compound, each positive tube could put anywhere from three thousand to thirty thousand people under a lying-down lockdown at home.Immediate temporary lockdown of so many compounds whenever a pooled sample turns positive looks like precision containment, but in reality the number of innocent people it collateral-damages is beyond counting. Pooled positives keep cropping up one after another; over the past week our compound has seen one almost every day. In other words, we effectively no longer have any normal life at all.But does this kind of lockdown actually catch the possible escapees? The answer is no. Some of the more socially active residents of our compound went out, and only learned through the WeChat group chat that their building or unit had been temporarily locked down. So they did not come home to sleep that night; instead they checked into hotels. These are precisely the people most active out in the community, the ones with the highest risk of spreading the virus, and yet they are the ones most likely to slip through the net of the temporary-lockdown policy. At present, in the areas of Beijing with the most severe outbreaks, almost every compound is like this. The end result is that ordinary people gain little benefit from the new "Twenty Optimization" policy, while the actual effectiveness of pandemic control remains unsatisfactory.So I earnestly urge the state, when drafting the next version of its pandemic-control policy, to give careful thought to this lying-down-lockdown phenomenon and to further develop more precise, less collateral-damaging optimization measures, so as to reduce the impact of containment on everyone as much as possible. That way the economy will be more vibrant, society more harmonious, and residents more willing to cooperate.