Consider This from NPR - Voices From Lockdown In Shanghai As The City Battles A Surge Of COVID Cases

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Cases of COVID-19 have been surging throughout China. The country has implemented a stringent "zero-COVID" strategy that includes mass testing, limited travel and large-scale lockdowns. In Shanghai, many residents haven't been able to leave their homes. It's an eerie reminder of the lockdowns in Wuhan during the first year of the pandemic. NPR's international correspondent Rob Schmitz spoke with two residents of a housing complex in Shanghai about their experiences with the city's lockdown.There are some people who are leaving their homes – mainly to enforce China's "zero-COVID" plan. China has hired tens of thousands of temporary workers to test, isolate and lock down entire cities.Beijing correspondent Emily Feng spoke to a few of those workers, many of whom are poorly treated and underpaid. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. Almost a week ago, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., Dr. Anthony Fauci, said this. We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase. Namely, we don't have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level. Fauci later spoke to NPR and clarified he was not saying the COVID-19 pandemic is over. It's not, according to the World Health Organization. And because the virus is still spreading, including highly transmissible Omicron sub-variants,

other governments across the globe are taking a much stricter approach, including China. The past six weeks have seen mass testing campaigns and various levels of lockdowns. And when you ask some living in China's biggest city how they're feeling? Yearning for freedom. I really wanted to go out. For a lot of people, they are feeling the same. That's Ming, who asked that we use just her first name for her safety. She is among tens of millions of Shanghai residents who have spent much of the last month in lockdown. Some have not been allowed to leave their homes since early April.

She works as a nanny, and she told NPR she's torn over whether the lockdowns are the best idea. On one side, people say we should go Europe or America, but on the other side, people are saying you cannot take this risk because we have a lot of old people or kids. I'm kind of on both sides. I don't want to take the risk of losing my family. Others have the job of carrying out and enforcing China's COVID safety measures.

Some say they're risking COVID exposure because they need the money, like Chin Haonan, a migrant worker from the southern city of Shenzhen. I am most worried that I cannot guarantee my own health. His fears came true. He'd been staying in a dorm with no running or bottled water, working for Shanghai's convention center. And last month, a self-test showed he had COVID. The leaders are not very responsible. They react very slowly to our needs. Consider this. China's zero-COVID strategy means the government is asking some citizens to control their so-called soul's desire for freedom, while asking others to risk their health to enforce public safety measures. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Monday, May 2nd.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. NPR's Rob Schmitz now covers Europe from his base in Berlin, but for nine years he was based in Shanghai, China, where he lived in a huge apartment complex called The Summit. He's still in touch with some former neighbors from The Summit through the group messaging app WeChat, which is where he heard this. That's a government drone elsewhere in Shanghai warning people who were

singing from their balconies. The message says, please comply with COVID restrictions. Control your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing. One of the only ways, honestly, to survive this lockdown is to have to see it through some kind of humor. These get circulated and we almost laugh at them. Ha Chung was one of my neighbors. She and her husband, Nadav Davidei, and their two kids have had to maintain

a healthy sense of humor lately as Shanghai approaches its sixth week of a city-wide COVID lockdown. China still maintains a zero-COVID policy, which for Han Nadav means they haven't been able to leave their apartment building since April 1st. Since then, the summit apartment's WeChat group has taken on a new life as an information hub for food delivery and required COVID testing, as a place to complain together, but also to help each other out and for whatever levity they can find. I asked both of them about that. Well, for me, it's been really a kind of lifeline. We had no connection to the outside world.

And so this WeChat group, it was really nice because there were, you know, there are obviously some people that I knew there from before, but then there was, you know, all these other new neighbors that kind of came out and made it interesting and helped us through this time, like helping with the group buys and helping with just making sense of, you know, when the testing was happening. We even started a Friday night trivia group, which was quite nice. I think that happened about two or three weeks into it, and then we figured out, oh my goodness,

this is going to continue, and we really need to do something social beyond just the chats. So there's these nice moments of kind of levity and community mixed in with what the heck is going on type of stuff. So we've been tested 10 days in a row. Today was the first day in 11 days we were not tested. And they bring in the medical teams, the doctors to do the testing, but the people to come call us, knock on our doors and get us downstairs and then check us off.

All of those are residents. And one of those residents, he's wearing those Dabai suits, the head-to-toe. Every day we'd see him and he was chatting us up. He's fully bilingual, really kind of engaging. And he's doing this every day on top of his work. We never met this guy before in our lives. And then turns out he was one of the people in our quiz night, that virtual quiz night I mentioned. And even then I didn't recognize him because he, you know, when we see him, he's like head to toe with hazmat. And the next day he saw us, he was like, oh, that was a great quiz. I was like, David, is that you? And that's how we got

to know David. Wow. You have two young children. How have they handled this? Yeah, it's been tough for them. At first it was, you know, a 48-hour lockdown. And actually I have to credit a meme that was going around about how there would be four-day lockdown. And in the meme it's these people who are playing Uno. And if you've played Uno before,

you know that there's like these plus four cards, right? These plus four, plus four, plus four cards. Yes. And so there is a meme going around about, you know, how many days are you going to be in lockdown? And it starts with the government says four days. And then someone's holding the cards and it's plus four, plus four, plus four. And so our oldest, who is nine years old, she had heard about this meme through her friends.

And so she was joking about it. And that's actually, in the end, really helped her mentally get through to it because she's thinking about that Uno meme and saying plus four, plus four, plus four. In a video shared on the Summit WeChat group, workers in blue Tyvek suits began to erect metal barriers at the entrance to your tower which is by far the largest tower in the complex because somebody tested positive the day before you were all able all set to be let out to wander the complex's courtyard for the first time let's listen to the response from your building as they were erecting these barriers.

So this is the sound of dozens of people screaming from their windows in protest. And that protest actually worked. The workers took down the barrier. Tell me about that incident. Yeah, I think to kind of set up the mood of how we were feeling in the tower. The hard lockdown started April 1st. And so we were good and we had been following all the rules and had gotten tested and everything. And by the time, you know, this came about like the, I think it was on a Thursday night or a Friday night, the day before, like you said, they had announced a new case and it came out of the

blue. And then when they brought the fencing in, that was, for me, like one of the lowest points so far in this lockdown for me is like, they were going to fence us in and it was just all that pent up frustration inside of us. You know, we felt like they didn't have any compassion for us by erecting this fence in front of us. And so this is why we were screaming, or at least why some of us were screaming.

But, you know, thankfully they listened and then they took it away shortly after. You all have been locked in for five weeks now, going on six weeks. And we talked a lot about some of the physical limitations to that. I want to talk mentally, what kind of impact has this had on folks there? You know, it's been tough for us. And as I said, we've had highs, we've had lows, and, you know, kind of keeping it together day in and day out without knowing where this is going and kind of getting the boulder rolled down the hill again and having to restart over and over and over kind of thing has been tough for us. But I can only imagine for those that are in other situations and more difficult than ours, Some of these people that are in our building

and in the same situation or same location as us, very different situation, are completely separated from their house, their families. There are those that have had medical issues come up. And some who have been sent to quarantine centers, right? Absolutely, yeah. One perspective that I think maybe people back in the U.S. don't get very much is they see this,

and this makes for horrible optics as we talked about, but we felt incredibly lucky to be in China from March 2020 when we came back from Singapore until a month ago. It was the best place to be in the world. There was no COVID there. We lived normal lives to the point where it was the best place to be in the world. Like, well, there was no COVID there. We lived normal lives to the point where it was the reverse. It was like, we kind of felt bad about it in times because people were really struggling everywhere.

And we were on vacations in really nice places. And our kids were in school from May and didn't miss a day of school. And so, I mean, the zero COVID policy was really beneficial to us. It was a real boon for us for a long time. And it feels very different now, obviously, but kind of on balance, I don't know. Those are my former neighbors and friends, Ha Chong and Nadav Davide.

That was NPR international correspondent Rob Schmitz. Since this conversation first aired last week, it was shared on WeChat. Within hours, it had been blocked by Chinese government censors. Of course, not everyone in Shanghai is forced to stay at home. During the pandemic, China has hired tens of thousands of workers to test, isolate, and lock down its cities. So where are all those workers coming from? And what are they going through? NPR's Emily Fang reports on China's new COVID cast. For decades, China's economy has relied on an itinerant class of what Chinese policymakers call its floating population. Some 300 million migrant workers who drift from city

to city doing construction work, service jobs, and factory assembly, often in poor conditions. An economic slowdown and more regulations means many of those sectors are shrinking. So labor agencies have been heavily recruiting now underemployed migrant workers to fill a new niche for cheap labor, COVID prevention. Worker Lu Weishuai says it's thankless work done by non-locals. All cities are the same, Shanghai, Wuhan. The vast majority look down on outsiders, migrant workers like me. Lu calls himself a professional COVID worker. He lost his job at a metal supply shop during the pandemic, so he turned to COVID prevention in Shenzhen. He gets paid about $100 a day,

working six-hour shifts twice a day. The outbreak in Shenzhen is mostly controlled, so they'll start firing workers. I got a group of buddies together, and we'll look for the next lockdown for more work. When Shanghai got locked down, Lu said he'd go help scan buildings, or saw low, slang for going door-to-door, convincing unwilling residents to take a PCR test. Except this time, Lu didn't make it to Shanghai. He got off the bus halfway after the temp agency tried to claim most of his salary as a finder's fee. We were tricked by a corrupt labor agent. I managed to get on another bus headed to a nearby city where there's

been an outbreak linked to Shanghai's. So now I'm going house to house, knocking on doors and doing PCR tests there. The same thing happened to Huang Bowen. He lost his job as an e-commerce marketer when tough new rules came into effect last year on online marketing. He agreed to a job administering PCR tests in Shanghai this month, taking a 20-hour bus ride to the city under lockdown. Except the bus brought us straight to a quarantine center for symptomatic patients. That's not the kind of work we've been promised. All of us workers did not dare enter without proper health training. But since we've been in Shanghai, we couldn workers did not dare enter without proper health training. But since we've been in Shanghai, we couldn't just get on a bus back home.

We've been quarantined as soon as we got back. After calling the police, Huang did make it home. He's in quarantine now, and he's now planning to live with his parents after, until he can find better work. Migrant Li Ke was already living in Shanghai when the city shut down. He's now wrapped up in PPE and working in a school turned into a makeshift quarantine facility, sleeping 10 to a room with other workers. But that's better than what his fellow migrant workers are going through. I consider myself lucky. I got out of my workers' dormitory in Shanghai before lockdown, so at least I can earn some money and pay the rent.

Li Ke may feel lucky, but the work he's doing carries extreme stigma. Because of China's ongoing strict pandemic controls, anyone associated with COVID prevention work literally becomes untouchable. After weeks on the job, they need to be kept apart and quarantined from the rest of the population for at least two weeks. Even though national policy is only two weeks, authorities insist on keeping me in here for four weeks of quarantine. This is Shi Wantian, who volunteered to work in a state quarantine center during an outbreak this year in the northern city of Langfang, not far from Beijing. Except, he contracted COVID in the first week. He was not allowed to isolate in the very

ward he was working in. Instead, he's being held in an off-the-grid facility, little more than a metal box with windows. I used to work at a factory for car parts, but during the lockdown, my work stopped, so I volunteered to staff at the isolation facility. Now the lockdown is over, but here I am in this state. Fifteen years ago, these were the workers assembling phones in Chinese factories, building skyscrapers, and fixing cars. Today, they're among the ranks of the dà bài, or big whites as China calls them, the ubiquitous COVID workers clothed in white protective gear,

anonymous yet essential. That was NPR's Beijing correspondent Emily Fang. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.