Outbreak in Suzhou
It’s been over two years since the COVID-19 pandemic started and Suzhou had not had an outbreak yet. Now with Omicron it was just a matter of time… and it finally happened.
Last week, a worker in a company located in Suzhou Industrial Park, aka SIP, was positive during a routine test. All her family, colleagues and contacts were tested. At this point, some schools already announced that they would postpone the start of the semester (students were still on Chinese New Year holidays). A handful of other positives were found during the weekend, and on Monday, February 14th, Suzhou woke up with the news that two whole districts (SIP and Wuzhong) needed to test all their residents. And Valentine’s day plans were thus scrapped (I saw a video of bunches and bunches of flowers piled up on community gates, as delivery guys could not enter).
Each residential community closed off their perimeter and erected testing camps inside their premises. It seems testing staff stayed up all night to prepare everything. Testing started at 6 am and long lines formed in each community. It seems samples are analysed in batches (instead of one by one), so if there’s a positive in one batch, everybody in it would be re-tested. After getting the swab (through the mouth, thankfully, China started using oral swabs very early on) people would get a pink slip and only then were they allowed to leave their residential community. I don’t know if everybody went to work afterwards, but at least my friends did. Considering that at this point they didn’t have their results yet, it seems weird that they allowed people to go to work before getting their test results.
More positives were found through these mass tests, so this morning (Wednesday), everybody went through the second round of testing. As of now there are 42 confirmed cases, which by China’s standard is already a serious outbreak.
I talked to my parents in law this morning and at that time they could still go out, but I’m not sure if the situation will change soon, considering the increase in positives. For now, many entries & exits in the highways around Suzhou were closed, intercity buses were cancelled and boarding a train requires a negative test result.
All images are screenshots from this YouTube video. It was nice seeing those familiar places, but I’m not missing those half grey skies. I hope the Suzhou outbreak is contained soon!
It does seem weird that you would test and then go to work while waiting for the results.
It’s definitely strange for China, considering how they are dealing with covid. People in Suzhou have their third round of PCR testing tomorrow, and it seems there will be 3 more rounds next week…
I’ve really been interested in watching the different ways that each country (and even states/prefectures within countries) have handled COVID. We were in Japan when COVID first broke out, and the differences between being in Japan, then Washington DC, then small-town New York have been astronomical.
There is definitely a huge difference between how China and my home country (Spain) dealt with it. China was able to resume normal life within 2 months in 2020 and then was basically covid free. But the country is basically closed and anyone entering has to go through a 28 days quarantine (in Suzhou, I think it’s 21 in other places) plus another 28 days of self observation with two PCR tests per week. I just think it’s too much and doesn’t make any sense now that we know more about the virus. Yesterday I read that Japan will be opening up gradually and that quarantine would be shortened from one week to 3 days (I think all foreigners living in China would kill for a week or 10 day quarantine haha. Most of them have not left the country in two years).
I’m on round four of testing. Things here are pretty quiet but can still go out. It helps mentally but there’s not much to do. Only the grocery stores are open at this point, no indoor dining in SIP and it’s QR codes to get on buses (which are running at about 1/3 of a normal schedule) or to go into any place. This outbreak is omicron so more serious from an infection standpoint and I’ve got the betting line set at over/under 15 tests before this is all done. Part of the problem is that they’ve turned covid into the the scariest disease ever with all the propaganda in containing the virus so people were freaking out for the first few days. Enjoy Spain and the sunshine!
Yesterday someone in the Spanish-speaking ladies WeChat group shared an annoucement saying that “today there will be no test” and they understood that “there will be no more tests”. I didn’t have the heart to make them aware of their misunderstanding haha.
In Tianjin it took a month to contain the outbreak, I guess it will be similar in Suzhou.
Meanwhile, Australia, Japan, etc. are reopening their borders and scrapping or shortening quarantine…
Don’t worry, they’ll find out soon enough. Round 5 tomorrow for me (not including the 2 extra ones I got so I could enter my apartment complex when I returned from CNY).
This has one child policy kind of mistake written all over it. Backed themselves into a corner. Scared the crap out of the entire population, then boasted of the superiority of the Chinese system to contain the virus. Standing firm with Covid-0 policy no matter the cost. Now the rest of the world is coming out the other side, returning to normal and the virus will likely be with us forever like the flu. We’re stuck with a two year old policy that would be a political defeat to change now. But the cost of sticking to it is growing and growing with no end in sight. But can’t voice that opinion because that would mean the party is wrong. Just like one child – waited way too long and the extra damage compounded. Almost everyone I know here has left or is leaving when their visas expire in June. Can’t take the isolation and they don’t feel welcome anymore either. Then again, maybe that is what they actually want.
The isolation really takes a big toll. When I was still there, sometimes I felt a bit of claustrophobia. Even though life was good, knowing that I couldn’t get out (or, to be precise, that going back would be very hard) gave me anxiety.
Then I had to leave for something unrelated to covid, haha.
But it seems things are about to change!! Keep your eyes open, maybe you’ll start seeing signs of a change in policy soon: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1009711
I just want the unscientific-and-not-based-on-facts 28 days quarantine scrapped!!
BTW, we’ve been following the events regarding the woman that was kept chained by the neck. I have a friend who is furiously sharing many articles related to kidnapped and sold women. It seems the conversation around the Xuzhou case has been heavily censored since the government got in charge of the investigation. It’s strange that foreign media have barely talked about it… maybe they were distracted by the Winter Olympics.
There are double standards at work when omicron arrived at our school. It was frustrating to try to understand, as in, is the virus serious? in which we all need to work from home? Or is it not serious? so why are some allowed to not return but others aren’t given the choice?
For sanity’s sake, I’ve stopped trying to make sense of the madness. And looking at Suzhou’s reaction, and what we know about covid and omi, one could ask the same type of questions. Plus, there’s all this news coming out about true origins, vaccines, prevention, etc, it’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist’s heart stop! :P
But at the end of the day, just looking forward to life returning normal, without restrictions, without masks or mandates!
I don’t mind masks as I was used to wear them for pollution. But I think things like covid passports are stupid, considering that someone who is vaccinated can also be infected and pass it to other people…
I totally understand the desire to return to “normal”, what I don’t understand is the anger around masks. From what I understand, wearing masks is common in the far east – pandemic or no pandemic – and is considered equally balanced between self-protection and courtesy to others. A colleague has routinely worn a mask on planes for years, having become fed up of getting ill straight afterwards – and found wearing the mask prevented it happening again. It feels like a small ask to me, especially if it allows people who are immunocompromised to have some form of life rather than remain in isolation for ever.
Yes, I don’t get that either. Here in Spain, some people call masks “muzzles”. As if they kept you from saying whatever you want… I remember that at the beginning of the pandemic there were (American) tv shows doing experiments and claiming that wearing a mask for too long would kill you because too much CO2. Oh well.