Two buildings in our community are locked down; today ours, fortunately, remains unsealed, the only building left in the neighborhood where one can still move about freely. But most people in Beijing’s Haidian District are already working from home, and to avoid trouble the great majority of our neighbors have stopped going out, so we are effectively just one step short of lockdown.I can only look out at the world through the window several times a day. The road outside has few pedestrians; sometimes not a single person passes for ages. It is not just our community that is nearly empty; the neighboring one is too. Because Beijing no longer publishes the neighborhoods where daily new cases live, we do not know whether the adjacent community is also under lockdown because of positive cases.Three years into the pandemic, we have so often been in a silent or half-silent state; some people can adapt, others surely cannot. To be honest, I personally am tired of this way of life and hope it changes soon. After all, it is not a long-term solution, and the data of the real world do not support carrying on like this indefinitely. To ignore those data and facts is to lose touch with reality. We understand the government’s difficulties, and we understand that epidemic policy must be weighed in light of each country’s specific conditions; but we also hope our own difficulties can be understood, and that the country will continue to optimize and adjust its prevention policy.Our family no longer goes out into the community; to be precise, we hardly step out the door. Because I wake early every day, I take out the trash at four in the morning, when not a soul is about. Deep down I loathe another nucleic-acid test, but I still comply with national policy and, as Beijing requires, get tested every three days. If I need to run errands in public places, I get tested the day before, trying to minimize the number of tests. For us now, going out for a nucleic-acid test is the biggest infection risk. Quite apart from cross-infection, each test is like opening a blind box; if the pooled tube happens to be positive, one gets quarantined as a close contact. To be honest, that quarantine policy is frightening.My child takes online classes at home all day and has not gone out at all; senior-year work is busy, and he has no time to go out, so he has not had a nucleic-acid test for seven days. Fortunately Beijing’s policy is fairly humane: as long as one stays home and one’s building has no infected residents, there is no hard requirement to test daily or every other day, and people are not casually assigned a red code. Our community locked buildings without erecting any barriers, which deserves praise; but I also know that Beijing is, after all, the capital, and that its more human preventive measures are beyond what many other places can manage.I see that Guangzhou is now making an exception for people like us who do not circulate in the community, not requiring them to test; Xinhua News Agency also published an article today praising this Guangzhou approach as precise exemption from testing, and calling it part of precise prevention. I hope this good policy spreads soon, reaches more people, and minimizes the impact on everyone.Today we received notice that our child’s English listening-and-speaking exam has been postponed. My child has a steady nerve, so the postponement does not much affect him, but many senior-year students are anxious about it. Over these three years, many people have wanted to see me, and I have politely declined; there was no other way. I am not afraid of illness in the least, but I am afraid of the impact on my family of quarantine after infection. So, as long as the country’s zero-COVID policy has not changed, until my child enters university I can only choose this cautious way of life.I pray that the good day comes soon when we no longer have to look at the world through this small window.