In China, the start of the new school year will again be marked this year by the government’s “zero Covid” policy. After a particularly trying summer, marked by the coronavirus, China is the last country with closed borders and the only country to undergo a so-called “zero Covid” strategy which boils down to three things: trace, screen, confine.
Trace, track, confine
To trace the population, China uses health passes that each citizen must show via their mobile phone to access all public places. If you cross a risk zone, your health pass will turn red and you will not be able to do anything for at least seven days.
To screen the population, mass PCR tests are organized in the middle of the street, almost every day. And regarding confinement, the simple fact of being in a city with a single positive case is enough to find yourself locked up. This is the case of Julien, a French expatriate on vacation on the island of Hainan, in southern China. “We arrived, we were confined,” he explains. Julien is not sick and is not in contact. “Today we may be reconfigured again. Our tickets have been canceled three times, we still don’t know if we can leave in a few days.”
The weariness of the Chinese
Being vaccinated does not change this situation and in the face of these restrictions which drag on, the Chinese are reacting more and more badly. After two and a half years with closed borders, and without the possibility of obtaining a passport to travel abroad, most of them say they are tired.
“People are no longer really afraid of the Covid, they are afraid of being locked up in their homes,” said one of them. “We are kept confined, before I had my own company but because of the Covid, business is bad,” says another. What was presented at the start of the epidemic as a victory over the Covid quickly turned into a health dictatorship, with dramatic consequences for the economy and no prospect of reopening in the coming months.