:Xi’An is an ancient and famous city, being the first capital city of China, and home to the terracotta army. For nearly a thousand years, it was the center of political and cultural power. Today, on Chinese internet, the name has somewhat of a bad reputation. But that is not today’s story.
I have seen streams of tweets about Xi’An recently, about the rising COVID cases and rats on the street spreading hemorrhagic fever to people.
Things have seemed to have gone far worse over the weekend. Yesterday, on December 19th, the government website announced a sudden city partial lockdown. The message goes:
:
(rough translation)
The Xi'An COVID command center has decided: from December 19th, the Chang-an university campus residential area is now high risk. Until December 19th, there is one high risk area and 13 medium risk areas.
News from the airport: from today, all outbound passengers will go through security measures in addition to temperature checking and health code control: all people from high and medium risk level areas are strictly forbidden to go out, and people from other areas need to submit the results of a COVID test done within 48 hours, no one is allowed to go into the terminal building without their test result certificate.
Health code is an app created to control travel for COVID. It is universally used in China. It is color coded. Green means you are free to go, yellow means you are in risk and people normally won’t let you pass, and red is a no-no and you will be quarantined. It is not so clear how the color is determined. It’s pretty fishy, and there are some rumors flying around on the web. However, this is still not today’s story.
In fact, the Xi’An lockdown already happened a few days ago. According to a Chinese news website, on the night of December 14th, some local hospitals started to lockdown, no patients could go in or leave. The reporter interviewed some local residents who came to the ER of one of the hospitals, only to be turned away by a guard. The residents said this had been the third hospital they have tried.
The hospitals resumed business as usual the next day, but required negative results of a PCR test within 48 hours for anyone to pass the gate. In the middle of the night, long queues to get emergency PCR tests appeared. This is expected in the past two years whenever a city discovers COVID cases.
On December 19th, videos popped up on twitter, allegedly from Xi’An. Below some screenshots.
Metal gate of a residential area were welded to keep the residents inside, tweet says it is because of the viral hemorrhagic fever:
Massive police forces on the street of Xi’An:
Massive number of medical workers in the street to facilitate the work needed.
Meanwhile, according to twitter source, local authority announced a lock down which triggered residents to panic-buy up daily products only to be told hours later that lock down wasn’t needed and people should stand by for further notice.
Main transportation roads are being cut off by 2 meter high metal fences:
Yesterday, thousands of kilometers away, in Beijing, , one neighborhood found one positive case, it was put under a lock down and in the middle of the night, a long queue of PCR testing formed.
Even though I could not verify the source, judging from what I have seen in the past two years, these are very believable.
In the morning of December 20th, everyone that travels in Xi’An has to show a locally-made health code to take public transport or just to get into offices. But that health code collapsed, according to Chinese media; the bus driver would let you on if you could just show your ID card, and travel history of the past 14 days on your cell phone.
Online jokes about the local IT firm that makes the software started spreading: the company couldn’t fix their own bugs because the engineers were not allowed into the office because their health code did not work.
Many citizens took to social media to complain: why not just let us work from home? Some commented on the requirement of 48h PCR tests to travel in the city – each test costs 60 yuan, is valid for 2 days, which means that everyday you have to go to work, your cost of travel just increased by 30 Yuan.
Now, because people can’t get the certificate for the PCR tests, and because the health code does not work, travelers need to promise that they did the test and the result was negative to get onto the subway.
So, the fight against COVID in Xi’An is going very well. Chinese government wants your governments to copy their homework. Copying homework is a new internet slang for following the example.