Shanghai lockdown turns eating into an adventure

In the networks they call ‘The Hunger Games’ to the everyday epic of many of the 25 million Shanghainese who they accumulate weeks locked up and without a departure date. China adds more than two years with its policy of zero tolerance and mass confinements but has never reached the current drama. Complaints are piling up about the erratic management of the local government that has neglected a population unaccustomed to shortages.

The paths to food are few and rocky. The Shanghainese woke up at dawn during the first weeks to fill the car in their mobile applications and prepare the finger to formalize the order at six in the morning. The early risers were soon revealed to be sterile by the saturationthe closure of many businesses and the shortage of messengers. Barely 11,000 work, heroic and already accustomed to spending the night in their carts or tents because they would be confined if they stepped on their houses. Discarded the individual fight, the collective one remains. The ‘group purchases’ became popular years ago to access mass orders with discounts, a kind of wholesale sales for individuals. The residents of a building or real estate complex get together these days in the hope of attracting the attention of a supplier.

“It’s exhausting, it’s not easy to get hundreds of people to agree. Every minute new messages arrive on the phone, you have to be on the lookout all day. Many, moreover, have lost their income and prices have skyrocketed in recent weeks “, reveals Liu, a young businesswoman. Shipments usually arrive late or do not arrive due to lack of stock. It remains, then, rely on government subsistence packages, of unpredictable frequency and content. And in solidarity. Yang was saved on her darkest days by a neighbor, a doctor and therefore exempt from confinement, who brought her supplies from a nearby store. Liu shares a building with a supermarket owner who puts her community first.

The scale of severity varies in a city where you reside half of the Spanish colony in China. There are well-stocked districts, and others where a dozen potatoes will bring joy. The concern about the lack of food, Yang reveals, is more manageable than that of the forced confinement in hospitals of infected children. Social outrage and complaints from embassies advised that the authorities stop separating children from their parents if only the former tested positive.

Boredom abounds and laments over shortages. It seems paradoxical that Wuhan successfully managed that unprecedented lockdown and Shanghai failed two years later. The key is perception. The Wuhanese were grateful for any shipment of groceries when they protected themselves from a terrifying virus that overwhelmed the hospitals and the Shanghainese are not satisfied with a few vegetables while they wonder if the two deaths in several months They justify the torment.

Most Chinese defend the zero-tolerance policy that has prevented die-offs and protected the economy from the calamitous cycle of openings and closings in the West. The ordeal of the Shanghainese has generated little solidarity in a country that sees them as conceited and chauvinistic. To their long confinement they have come for their management errors, point out many, and it is difficult to deny them. Its authorities responded with localized quarantines to contagion figures that had already justified strict closures in other cities, they later innovated with a phased confinement (first half of the population, then the other) that also failed and they only closed Shanghai with the pandemic unleashed. In the latest and disconcerting twist, they recently announced the relaxation of the quarantine when the city beat the number of infections for the tenth consecutive day.

Xi’an, with 13 million inhabitants, decreed the lockdown with a hundred cases and ended the outbreak in two weeks. Shanghai resisted with several thousand and some districts add more than a month in quarantine. Its hardships have returned the debate on the validity of the zero tolerance policy, sterile due to the fidelity of the government, when it seems more urgent to refine it. “I’ve already lost count of the days I’ve been home. They say they will release us in April but they are just rumours. And if a single positive comes out in my urbanization, they extend the quarantine for two more weeks & rdquor ;, says Yang.