COVID!!
So we did sneak in a Thanksgiving dinner between all the lockdowns. The Sunday after Thanksgiving we were cleared to have a small Thanksgiving dinner. We had a few families over. We missed our families in the States, but it was super nice to get together and the food was all delicious – especially Celia’s tart!
After my last entry things continued to get a little crazy here. During that initial locking of our neighborhood they had everyone in the neighborhood line up and get tested. The delivery people and the Ayis (“Aunties” – women who clean the homes and do childcare) were caught also locked in to our neighborhood. Even delivery people who were just delivering a package at the wrong moment got locked in. They were held for maybe 12 hours in our complex. We were freed after around 24 hours as no one had Covid.
The kids school planned to open the following week, but the one school that got permission to open had a case of Covid on the first day opened, so it was shut back down and all other opening of schools were denied. Covid was spreading in Beijing and it seemed the government couldn’t keep up with their routine of picking up possible near contacts of near contacts and quarantining them. Fewer and fewer people were getting picked up as the system appeared to be overloaded. People started protesting. Many neighborhoods where people lived more tightly than in ours had been locked down apparently for months. We were on an emotional rollercoaster – so depressed to be shut in by Covid again. To have travelled so far to end up not being able to experience China – why are we here? And then for a half a day we’d get hopeful that things would improve – that the kids could go to school – and then things would look worse.
Back to our story: Someone in our neighborhood caught Covid and many in the neighborhood gathered to block entry to her house – so she couldn’t get picked up. The government never showed up for her. The government made a statement about this variant being weaker, then restrictions quickly started to get dropped. All happened very quickly. Schools were still closed, people were getting sick. People were panicked as they had heard for three years how dangerous Covid is. The city was a ghost town. Things were shut – no longer due to regulations but because there was no one to work places – everyone was sick. Dan got Covid. For five days he would sleep between his online meetings. Travel restrictions in China were finally lifted and vacation was a few days away. Saturday morning the 17th, Dan woke feeling better and I booked flights to Xi’an for the next day.