A Month of Semi-Lockdown, and My Mood Has Still Taken a Hit
This wave of Beijing's epidemic has lasted a full month with no improvement; if anything, the situation has worsened. My district, Haidian, has entered full-district home-office upgraded controls. After a month of this, I am tired—not just everyone else, but I myself.
My son has taken online classes at home under our noses for a month, leaving the apartment only for nucleic-acid tests, and yesterday his Health Kit suddenly showed Pop-up Code 3. His mother and I, who range farther, had no abnormal alerts at all. This gave me a firsthand look at how ridiculous big-data execution can be; with accuracy this poor, no wonder control effects are so unsatisfactory.
To clear his popup, I contacted the community. The staff did not know what this inexplicable popup was about either, telling me the epidemiological data had not arrived and the cause was unclear. The school pressured us for a test, while the loudspeakers at the testing site announced that Pop-up Code 3 people could not be tested there. We knew he had been misflagged, and the school needed to satisfy its own paperwork, so we took him along to explain. In the end, no one cared whether we had a popup; they just swabbed us directly.
Today's news reported that a recreational gathering in a Haidian compound had caused a cluster infection. Such news makes no waves in our own neighborhood. The activity center is still packed; grandpas and grandmas, young men and women, and children chasing, shouting, and shrieking still cannot be bothered to wear masks, and no one supervises them. It is understandable—if it goes on much longer they will be driven to despair.
In the 2020 outbreak, everyone cooperated closely. This year compliance is far lower. Add Omicron's formidable transmissibility, and it is not hard to see why Beijing's wave is so hard to control. On the surface enormous efforts have been made and sacrifices are real, but anyone with a little medical common sense who lives in Beijing can intuit that current lockdowns still cannot achieve zero-COVID, and that after zero-COVID the virus will return all too soon.
Life will probably just oscillate on like this. As the environment and climate deteriorate and humans encroach ever closer on wildlife, viruses long latent in nature are growing more active. Frequent plagues, and the economic and social problems they bring, will be the dominant problems we face for a long time to come.
Living in such an age is hard. Even I, usually easygoing, feel oppressed from time to time. I can only do my best to make life interesting. My mood cannot be as bright as it used to be, so I settle for second best and look for small pleasures; I cannot let this outbreak break me.
I have collected many flowerpots around the compound: whenever a neighbor renovates, I rummage through the demolition rubble for pots worth saving. Now they have come into use. Living on the ground floor, I found a spot in the backyard and turned it into a flowerpot vegetable garden. After a few weeks, the vegetables in the pots look quite presentable—though it would have been even better to start a month earlier.
For years I have woken early, rising around four or five every morning. I am almost always the first person up in our compound; I water my potted garden and breathe the free morning air outside. At that hour, no one else is about. This is my last bit of outdoor recreation; once the community fills with people, we no longer go out, because so many residents simply refuse to wear masks. Never mind N95s—many won't even wear surgical masks. Now, whether a compound sees infections or a full lockdown is pure luck.
I fear centralized quarantine and losing this last scrap of freedom. So until the country abandons zero-COVID, I will do my utmost not to catch COVID; home is the last line I mean to hold. Staying cooped up like this is stifling, but it beats being dragged off to centralized quarantine.
Of course, even if policy changes in future, I do not plan to relax personal protection. I have been studying this virus's data for a long time. People are so oppressed right now that many emphasize how mild it is and how low the fatality rate.
But based on the many country-by-country studies I have long read in Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao (Zaobao), it is still troublesome, and many unknown variables remain that require longer observation; yet it is not as terrifying as some exaggerated domestic writers describe. Personally, it is better not to be infected if one can avoid it; if protection truly fails, then there is no help for it.
Just hold on a while longer. There is no better option.