After Leona Cheng tested positive for coronavirus late last month, she was told to pack her luggage for a hospital stay. When the ambulance came to her apartment in downtown Shanghai to pick her up two days later, no one said otherwise.
So Ms. Cheng was surprised when the car stopped not at a hospital but at a sprawling convention center. Inside, the empty halls were divided into living areas with thousands of makeshift beds. And on the partitions of the exhibition stands, the purple signs bore the numbers outlining the quarantine zones.
Ms. Cheng, who stayed at the center for 13 days, was among the first of hundreds of thousands of Shanghai residents sent to government quarantine and isolation facilities as the city copes with an increase in coronavirus cases for the first time in a pandemic. The facilities are a key part of China’s virus tracking, tracing and elimination program, which has met with unusual public opposition in recent weeks.
Footage on Chinese social media on Thursday showed members of a Shanghai community protesting the use of apartment buildings in their complex to isolate people who tested positive for the virus. Police officers in white protective suits can be seen physically retaliating against angry residents, some of whom begged them to stop.
China’s leaders say the country, unlike much of the rest of the world, cannot afford to live with the virus because it has a large and vulnerable aging population. But China’s zero-tolerance policy – in which anyone who takes a positive test is sent to hospital or isolation and close contacts are placed in quarantine hotels – is becoming both a logistical and a political challenge, as employees are facing more than 350,000 cases since the start of the current epidemic in March.
As of April 9, Shanghai has turned more than 100 public places, including public schools and newly built high-rise office buildings, into temporary facilities called fangcang or square-cabin hospitals. They are designed to house more than 160,000 people who tested positive for the virus, officials said last week.
Protests erupted Thursday in the Zhangjiang Nashi International housing estate in Shanghai’s Pudong district after the developer informed 39 households that they would have to relocate because employees would turn nine buildings into insulation facilities, the developer said in a statement.
When Ms. Cheng first arrived at the exhibition center, he felt huge, cold and empty, she said in a telephone interview. Ms. Cheng, a student in her early 20s, also wrote about her experience on Chinese social media.
The fluorescent lights were on, but she tried to rest. She woke up the next morning and found that her room was suddenly crowded.
There was no tap for running water or showers, Ms. Cheng said, so every day she and others crowd around a few freshwater machines, waiting to fill the pink plastic sinks that were given. Portable toilets soon filled with so much human waste that Ms. Cheng said she stopped drinking water for a few days so she wouldn’t have to use them so often.
Even if someone had figured out how to turn off the spotlights, Ms. Cheng said, it would still be difficult to fall asleep at night. Then people shouted their complaints and let out steam.
“Many people complained, and some people shouted that it was too smelly to sleep,” she said.
Worried about upsetting her mother, Ms. Cheng did not tell her she was in Fangkang. Instead, she said she could not make video calls, giving her mother vague answers about daily life in quarantine. A woman sleeping in a nearby bed took a similar approach when talking to her daughter. The two women shared a smile when they discovered they had the same secret.
Ms. Cheng said she was struggling to come to terms with the quarantine system, which reduced it to a number. If she wanted something, she had to find a nurse or a doctor who was assigned to her area. But nurses and doctors were so busy it was difficult to get help, she said.
Ms. Cheng said she once admired the government’s goal of keeping the virus out of China. This meant that she could live a normal life for more than two years, even when cities and countries around the world had to be locked up.
Now she is not so sure.
“This time I feel out of control and it’s not worth controlling the cases because it’s not so dangerous or deadly,” she said, referring to the highly contagious version of Omicron. “It’s not worth sacrificing so many resources and our freedom.”
Joy Dong and Li Yu contributed to the study.
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