In footage shared on social media last week, a crowd of people in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang bang against the windows of a clothing market as they shout in frustration at the announcement of yet another round of COVID-19 tests.
Although the local government quickly urged people not to “spread rumors” about the incident, the response from netizens was immediate.
“Refuse quarantine!” one said.
Photo: AP
“Many people have awoken to the truth,” another said.
“It’s actually over,” said a netizen posting on WeChat under the username “Jasmine Tea.” “The common cold is more serious than this... The testing agencies want this to go on. The vaccine companies want to inoculate forever.”
The comments reflect the growing frustrations throughout China, as authorities use all the tactics in their “zero COVID” playbook to grapple with the more infectious Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
As case numbers surge, the public is wondering whether the government’s increasingly complex “dynamic clearance” methods — including the continuous testing of residents — still work.
At a briefing last week, Chinese National Health Commission Vice Minister Wang Hesheng (王賀胜) said China’s increasingly refined tactics had reduced inconvenience.
“It shows that at the cost of the normal activities of very small numbers of people and the control of movement in very small areas, what comes in exchange is normal production and normal life for the widest range of regions and people,” he said.
However, there have been signs that a lack of clarity and consistency is exasperating the public, and China’s social media censors have been working overtime to try to clear the tide of complaints.
In Yanjiao in Hebei Province, a dormitory town for workers in Beijing, residents have been struggling to get home amid stringent lockdowns.
Images shared online, many of which have already been deleted, showed residents lining up in heavy snow for test results to get out of the capital. The posts drew hundreds of comments.
“It’s been three years since the outbreak and the government is still so ineffective in handling it — lazy one-size-fits-all government in complete disregard for the life and death of the people,” one user named Aobei posted on Sina Weibo.
Economic hardships have also been mounting. A courier surnamed Mao in the badly hit city of Changchun in northeastern Jilin Province said that 90 percent of the neighborhoods have been shut down, and he could not earn a living.
“I don’t have any choice, I can only wait for them to unseal the city — it’s hopeless,” he said.
Residents have also complained about the arbitrary nature of the rules, as well as the unchecked power of the neighborhood residential committees responsible for enforcing them.
In Beijing, one family said their residential committee was about to install a monitoring device on their apartment door to ensure they complied with an order to stay home for two weeks. The order came after a family member entered a supermarket that had been visited two days before by a confirmed COVID-19 case.
In Shanghai, residents were also bewildered by the uneven testing standards and lockdown thresholds imposed by apartment blocks and compounds across the city.
However, China’s policies have caused more than mere inconvenience, with netizens increasingly willing to discuss how lockdowns led to tragedy.
A widely shared post on Sina Weibo last week reported that a patient undergoing chemotherapy at the Shanghai Cancer Hospital died while locked down in her lodgings next to the hospital.
In posts since deleted, bereaved citizens also shared stories about the death of loved ones caused by COVID-related disruptions.
“My dad died of a stroke at the end of last year,” said one, posting under the name MaDDNa. “There was some hope of treatment. Unfortunately, we had to wait for a nucleic acid test report and missed the best treatment time.”
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