LIfe in a Chinese Covid quarantine camp

I spent 10 days in a secret Chinese Covid detention centre | Financial Times - Thomas Hale:

November 2, 2022 - "The call came from a number I did not recognise. 'You need to quarantine,' a man on the other end of the line said in Mandarin. He was calling from the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 'I’ll come and get you in about four or five hours.' I dashed out of my hotel to stock up on crucial supplies.... Four to five hours later, I received another phone call. This time it was a woman from the hotel’s staff. 'You are a close contact,' she said. 'You can’t go outside.' 'Am I the only close contact in the hotel?' I was, she told me and added 'the hotel is closed', meaning locked down. I went to the door of my room and opened it. A member of staff was standing there. We both jumped....

"The men in hazmat suits arrived a little later. First, they administered a PCR test with the same rushed weariness of the man who had called me earlier. Then, one escorted me down the deserted hallway. We passed the lifts, which were blocked off and guarded, and took the staff elevator. Outside, the entrance was also cordoned off. A hotel with hundreds of rooms had been frozen for me alone. In the empty street, a bus was idling. It was small, a vehicle for school trips or large families, maybe. We drove off.... It is a curious experience, as an adult, to be driven somewhere without having any idea of the destination.... 

"Eventually, we came to a stop on a small road in the middle of a field. The driver was instructed, over walkie-talkie, to keep going. But this was impossible because there were several full-sized coaches in front of us, and small crowds of people wandered around in the darkness. 'I can’t drive, he barked into his handset and proceeded to get out, lock the bus behind him and wander off into the night.... The queue of buses slowly disappeared into what looked like a brightly lit gate at the end of the road.... We waited. None of us — not me, not the other passengers, not our driver — had tested positive for Covid-19.

"Around 2 am, our driver climbed back on board.... We continued deeper inside China’s quarantine apparatus, the kind of place that finds you, rather than the other way around. It is part of a system scarcely conceived of or understood by the outside world, one defined almost in opposition to it. It is a system that seeks to eliminate rather than cohabit with coronavirus, one in which an unknown number of people are detained.... That approach, known as 'zero Covid', is one of maximal suppression of the virus. It employs contact tracing, constant testing, border quarantine and lockdowns in order to stop community transmission of the virus as soon as a case is detected. It is aggressive and could only really exist in the long-run in an autocratic society with the mechanisms for mass surveillance already in place. There is no end in sight to the policy, despite China’s vaccination rate of about 90 per cent.... It is, above all, another kind of bureaucracy, with a vast workforce behind it....

"When the bus finally reached its destination many hours later, we quietly disembarked. Each of us was asked to confirm our presence on the 'name list', [and] ... each assigned a room number.... The facility consisted of neat rows of what might be described as cabins, each one a shipping container-like box, sitting on short stilts above the ground.... It was hard to tell how many cabins there were in all. Fluorescent outdoor lighting flickered above, and a camera was positioned with a view of every door. Neither was ever turned off.... 'There’s no hot water,' someone shouted. Somewhere a woman wailed, and it occurred to me there were no children here.... 

"China’s Omicron nightmare: ‘Quarantine in metal boxes under zero-COVID policy," Hindustan Times, Jan. 13, 2022

"Inside my 196-sq-ft cabin there were two single beds, a kettle, an air-conditioning unit, a desk, a chair, a bowl, two small cloths, one bar of soap, an unopened duvet, a small pillow, a toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste and a roll-up mattress roughly the thickness of an oven glove. The floor was covered in dust and grime. The whole place shook when you walked around, which I soon stopped noticing. The window was barred, though you could still lean out. There was no shower.... 

"The daily rhythm went as follows. Early in the morning, we awoke to a lawnmower-like noise, which was in fact an industrial-grade disinfectant machine spraying our windows and front steps. Meals were provided at 8am, noon and 5pm. Around 9am, two nurses in blue hazmat suits came by to administer PCR tests.... I kept to a strict personal routine ... interspersed with constant cleaning to keep the dust at bay.... Any discomfort was secondary to the psychological impact of uncertainty. Although I was told on arrival my stay would be seven days, it would in fact be 10.... After a while, all my other problems dissolved and I thought only of getting out....

"It is easier to climb up to heaven than to discern the inner workings of the name lists.... In order to get your name on the one that allows you to leave, you need to be on the so-called double test list a day earlier. If you are, nurses take a sample from your nose and mouth and then do the same for the other nostril. I lobbied extensively to be on this list, but nothing could be confirmed until the day itself. When the nurses came, they also tested the floor, my bag, my mobile phone and the remote control for the air-conditioning unit. All of them, like the dozen or so tests I had taken in the previous two weeks, were negative. Eventually, my code turned green....

"Back in my hotel, the hot water was hot and the mattress soft. The number on the scales in the bathroom was lower. It was the right time for a celebratory meal. But any restaurant would require me to scan my QR code, risking a repeat of the whole affair. I spent some time pacing back and forth in the street, struggling to decide what to do."

Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/77622627-9433-445a-a763-a547b77b58ed