Yurley has been in China for four years and almost half of them have been spent under restrictions due to the covid-19 pandemic.
But she affirms that she had “never” experienced a situation like the current one: the last confinement has been “the worst” of all, for her.
Early Monday morning, Chinese police knocked on the door of his apartment in downtown Shanghai while he was sleeping.
She was then transferred to a quarantine center, where the 27-year-old Colombian she still remains locked up, desperate and with growing frustration.
China has imposed a new lockdown on Shanghai, its most important financial center, amid a new wave of covid-19 cases sweeping much of the country.
With 45 cities confined, partially or totally, according to a report published by the investment bank Nomura last week, the Asian giant has increasingly problems keeping its “zero covid” policy.
So far, Shanghai is the largest city that has been quarantined. But the logistical challenges required to confine the 25 million people who live in the megalopolis are enormous.
The government has created confinement centers throughout the city. Many do not have showers and they only have folding beds.
Infected people live in them squeezed next to each other.
in full lockdown
Yurley, who works for a company that exports products from China to Colombia, finds himself in one of them located in an area in the north of the city that he does not know well, but that “seems industrial.”
Remember that since the beginning of the confinement, the Shanghai authorities began to do routine tests in the different communities.
“Every day they were doing tests on us,” he says in an interview with BBC Mundo.
On April 4, he had a test and saw that the result on his mobile app was “abnormal”, but he never received the final results of that test.
“When my QR code changed and turned red, I began to suspect that something was wrong,” he adds.
Three days later, Yurley and her boyfriend underwent home covid-19 tests to be allowed out of their residential complex, as they wanted to walk their pet.
He had no serious symptoms, “just a mild cough,” but his test came back positive.
‘It is unfair’
They then did a PCR test on her, her boyfriend and Demi, her South African roommate.
The Colombian assures that they did not send her the result of that test either, but Demi was informed that she had covid-19.
Yurley received “a Chinese vaccine”, while her partner, who “has never tested positive”, received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Demi has not been vaccinated.
After testing positive, the South African received a phone call from the health authorities where they asked her where and with whom she lived, and asked her to prepare because “in the next 48 hours” they were going to look for her.
Yurley was only asked for his address.
“I told them to let me stay at home because I live with my boyfriend, I have a private bathroom and I asked them to do another PCR on us, because the antigen tests were already giving me negatives for April 12,” says the young woman from Bucaramanga .
But he never received an answer.
On Sunday, April 17 at 11 p.m., Demi received another call announcing that they were going to pick her up in two hours and asking her to inform her roommate, “Miss Benítez” to also prepare.
“At 3am they picked up Demi, but I told them I wasn’t going to go,” says Yurley.
“My consulate had advised me not to go, because it was unfair that they never informed me personally that they were going to take me out of my house.”
‘Everything seems like a formality’
They left, but half an hour later they started playing again.
The police showed up with a video camera and showed him a note saying that if he didn’t follow the rules he would have legal complications.
The agents spoke only Mandarin, but they promised Yurley that there were people in the quarantine center who spoke English. A promise that he would soon realize was untrue.
And, without further ado, they put her on the bus.
“I started to cry because I felt a lot of frustration. I knew that I no longer had covid, that I was already negative,” he explains.
In addition, he says that everyone on the bus looked sad, frustrated and “nobody looked sick.” He adds that in the 20 minutes that the journey lasted, he did not hear anyone cough.
“Everything seems like a formality, it seems as if the authorities only want to justify the construction of all these hospitals“, He says.
the only foreigners
The Colombian points out that she is lucky, because the hospital where she was transferred is not as bad as she thought.
“Everything is new. The only difficult thing is sleeping. It was very difficult for me last night, because the lights are always on and there is a lot of noise 24 hours a day,” he says.
He estimates that in his center there are “about 600 people” who usually talk at the same time, play music and watch series with the volume “very high”.
Yurley and Demi claim to be the only two foreigners in the place, where “no one speaks English.”
“I managed to ask for two beds in a cubicle in Chinese, near a window, and fortunately they did,” adds Yurley, specifying that in that hospital each cubicle has two beds.
‘People are fed up’
Yurley has noticed that The Chinese have run out of patience in the last days.
“People in Shanghai are fed up, even the Chinese are protesting more and more and putting up flyers saying that this is the death lockdown, that people are dying,” he says.
“It’s also been super sad because so many pets have starved to death or have been abandoned in the homes of the same owners.”
The lockdown in Shanghai is so strict that it is difficult to get food.
The total confinement prevents people from leaving their homes, even to buy basic products.
Three types of confinement, in theory
Jiangchuan Wu, a journalist for the BBC’s Chinese service, explains that in Shanghai there are currently three types of lockdowns that apply to residential complexes.
First of all, there are the complexes in which there has been no infection for 14 continuous days, whose residents can leave.
Then there are those that register cases of infection, but not in all buildings. Residents of buildings without cases can go out, but can only move within the complex.
And finally there are the complexes in which cases have been registered in different buildings and whose residents cannot leave their homes.
“In theory, some people can leave home and walk in the city, but it’s very difficult,” Wu explains.
“Official data ensures that there are millions of people under these types of conditions, but it is difficult to verify this information. Personally, I have not seen it.”
Yurley says he doesn’t know of a single community that’s open, either.
no food
Since early April, Shanghai residents have reported difficulties ordering food online, and even restrictions on when they can place their orders, due to shortages of supplies and a lack of staff to deliver them.
During the first days of the confinement, Yurley remembers that he could not get anyone to bring him food.
It was from the second week that he began to receive some products through community deliveries.
“But they were very Chinese vegetables that we didn’t even know how to cook, vegetables that I don’t even know the name of, because they don’t exist in my culture,” he explains with frustration.
Since the beginning of the month, the Chinese government has been giving away boxes of food to people in fully confined communities.
“This is unsustainable, how much money is Shanghai spending with this lockdown?” Yurley asks.
Two negative tests to get out
The young Colombian will remain in the hospital until two PCR tests are done and they come out negative.
Last Monday they did the first one and on Tuesday night he was still waiting for the result.
If the test comes back negative, you have to wait for another round of testing, which is supposedly in “a couple of days”, and hope that the result is consistent.
For now, he has stopped working and had to cancel all the meetings he had planned. He is busy reading, doing crossword puzzles, but he says that every minute he spends in the quarantine center seems like hours.
“At the beginning they said that the confinement would last five days and now it’s more than fifteen. When will this end?”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-61151867, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-04-20 11:40:05
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