It seems to be going in the right direction with corona in Shanghai: according to official figures, the number of daily infections is steadily decreasing and about twelve million of the city’s 25 million inhabitants are now allowed to go outside again. with those numbers Wu Ganyu, a senior health official, came on Wednesday.
Yiqian, a consultant with whom this newspaper spoke earlier, has not yet noticed that anything is really improving in the city. “Propaganda would like you to believe that, my friends outside Shanghai often believe it too,” said the 27-year-old woman. “But all I see is that more and more people are being taken out of their homes and taken to hospitals and quarantine facilities.”
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That also happened to her 63-year-old father. Yiqian initially thought she had persuaded the authorities to leave him at home, because after an initial positive test, he had already tested negative and had stopped feeling sick.
But on Saturday she was suddenly called by three different authorities. They all said: your father has to go to the hospital. She couldn’t see the point, but finally gave in. “We were tired.” The room was good, although no doctor looked after her father. That was not necessary either: he was symptom-free.
The reason for including her father seems to be mainly a political one. On the same Saturday that her father was admitted, Chen Jie, the party secretary of her Baoshan district, gave a speech. In it he announced that the national government demanded that there would be no more so-called ‘social infections’ from Wednesday.
“This is a military order, there is no room for negotiation, we can only grit our teeth and fight for victory. You can also call it a total attack, an ultimate fight to reverse the trend of the epidemic,” he said.
The speech seems to be the inspiration behind the decision to pick up Yiqian’s father, and with him many others who were no longer sick. The requirement to open up a neighborhood is not that there is no longer any transmission of the disease, but only that there are no more ‘social infections’ there.
“Nobody knows exactly what that term means, it’s one big chaos,” Yiqian says. “They don’t really know who is infected or not. In our building there was another positive case, but the neighborhood committee had no idea where that person lived.”
Societal Contagion
In principle, a social contagion is a contagion that takes place between people who roam freely in the city, or at least in their own neighborhood or in their own residential complex. So it does not concern people who have been admitted to a hospital, an isolation facility or places where people are housed who have been in close contact with infected people. “Social infections” are only a small part of the total: on Thursday, for example, there were more than 18,000 new infections, of which only 421 were social.
It offers the city the way out of opening parts of the city much earlier than waiting until there are really no more cases. And such a way out is desperately needed: it is not possible to provide all residents in lockdown with medical care, medicines and food and the damage to the economy is enormous.
But Yiqian’s father is the victim: there is now much more pressure to get people like him, and also people who have been in close contact with infected persons, out of the more open part of society as quickly as possible. Then the city can say as soon as possible that Shanghai has overcome corona, even if in fact there are still thousands of local infections per day.