The end of an era

I remember the exact moment when I realised it was over. It was the 6th of December 2022. After four days stuck at home due to a flu (which I now think may well have been Covid), I left my flat and walked to the shopping mall near my home in Beijing's Chaoyang district. I wanted to get some fresh air, and also buy some supplies at the mall's supermarket. 

When I entered the mall I had to scan a QR code with my Beijing Health Kit app, just like every other time for the past three years. My last PCR test had been taken 5 days ago, as my app clearly displayed, and I was by no means certain they would let me in. In fact, I pretty much expected to be turned away. The last time I had been out of my home, public places all required a negative result from a test taken within the last 48 hours.

To my surprise, the security guard happily waved me through. Once I got in, I saw that there were customers sitting down in some of the restaurants. The last time I had been out, restaurants were only doing deliveries and dining in was forbidden. I had heard that some places had started reopening in outlying districts of Beijing, but I barely believed it, and I thought that in my area everything was still closed. 

According to the official statistics (which, as I now know, were already becoming unreliable), there had been thousands of Covid cases in Beijing over the previous day, of which hundreds had been found "in society" (among people not subjected to any form of preventive quarantine). 

The fact itself that restaurants might reopen wasn't strange. They have been open for most of the past three years, after all. But the idea that the government might allow them to open up again while the city was clearly in the midsts of an uncontrolled Covid outbreak would have seemed outlandish just a few days earlier. 

At that moment, I knew that the Chinese government's attitude towards Covid had changed, drastically and probably for good. When you live in China you develop a feel for what way the political wind is blowing (and Covid-control policies are inherently political). Official government announcements are opaque and ambiguous, but you learn to read the room. Beijing, as the capital, is always particularly well protected, and if they were ready to let Covid spread in Beijing, this meant they were determined to transition towards "living with Covid" all over China.

So that was it. The three year-long gargantuan effort to prevent an infectious aerial-born disease from spreading in China was being abandoned. All of the measures that had defined the rhythm of our lives over the past three years, and especially the past year (mass PCR tests, sudden lockdowns, closed borders), were all going to be consigned to the dustbin in no time. Also, we were all going to get Covid. 

The next day, China's national health authority officially announced that people with Covid would be allowed to quarantine at home, something that would have been unthinkable just a week earlier. Following that, public places stopped asking people to scan QR codes with their tracing apps, and it became possible to travel anywhere in China without taking a PCR test or getting quarantined. Then they retired the 行程吗, the app that shows all the cities and counties where you've been over the last 7 days. In a matter of days, China felt like a different country.

An empty shopping mall in Beijing, December 14

I had been saying China should open up since at least March this year, when Omicron started to spread and Shanghai and other cities were put under brutal lockdowns. And yet when it happened it felt disconcerting. Deep down I had never really believed the Chinese government was going to give up on containing Covid. I don't think most Chinese did either. 

And then, from one day to the next, it happened. Official government WeChat accounts, which for years had been keeping people updated on the latest quarantine policies and lockdowns, were suddenly publishing articles with titles like "what to do if you are at home with Covid" and "how long after getting Covid is it ok to go back to work".

Somewhat naively, I had imagined that if Zero Covid ended everyone would be rushing to travel, go out and have fun. The reality has of course been somewhat different. The moment China abandoned its total elimination approach, Covid spread like wildfire throughout the country. In Beijing it happened particularly fast, since the virus was already spreading significantly before they lifted all the restrictions (in fact, as I mentioned earlier, I may have caught it just before the containment measures ended). 

The Covid pandemic didn't stop being a source of worry, but the things people had to worry about changed suddenly. Instead of worrying about waking up and finding your building had been locked down, or getting a phone call telling you that you had been in the same place as someone positive and had to be taken to a quarantine centre, suddenly everyone was worrying about where to get hold of home testing kits, ibuprofen and cough medicine, or how to protect elderly relatives from infection. 

The first time I heard of a friend getting Covid in Beijing was on the 5th of December. He had tested positive with a home antigen test. At the time people still assumed they might get sent to a quarantine camp, so he decided to stay home and not tell anyone. By the 10th of December, only five days later, it felt like half the city had been infected, and people were openly sharing news of their infections on social media.

Over the following week or two, most of my friends came down with the virus. Restaurants that had just opened up had to close again because all of their staff was sick. I know Omicron spreads quickly, but the speed of the contagion still shocked me. We've probably never seen the virus encounter such an immunologically naive population before, since just a month ago almost no one in China had contracted Covid.

Within days of the restrictions ending, the streets of Beijing became emptier than they had been during the peak of the lockdowns. Everyone was either infected, or afraid of becoming infected. The few people you saw were wearing an N95 mask, rather than the blue surgical masks that used to be the norm. Government messaging may have changed all of a sudden, but you don't go telling people that Covid is the plague for three years, and then turn around and tell them it's no worse than a flu and expect them to lose their fear.

Crowds in central Beijing on Christmas Eve

It's now been about three weeks since China opened up, and in Beijing people are starting to go out again. Restaurants and gyms are filling up. Most people have either had Covid, or are fed up with being careful. The public will only be cautious for so long, as much of the world found out in 2020. On Christmas Eve there were large crowds in Sanlitun's shopping and bar district, although almost everyone was still wearing a mask.

Of course things may be back to normal on the streets, but they aren't in the hospitals. Official statistics on the number of Covid deaths are so low as to be meaningless, but there is no question that people are dying and that hospitals in Beijing are overwhelmed by all the serious cases. And one can only imagine what it's like in the poorer parts of China. 

Essentially China is now going through what most other countries experienced in 2020, except with a milder but more contagious Covid variant and with vaccines (although quite a few Chinese aren't vaccinated, in what can only be described as a serious policy failure). The young and healthy are learning to live with the risk of Covid, while the elderly and frail continue being careful or risk ending up in hospital. Soon it will come to seem normal here too.