Thread by @Changxche

Harrowing diary of a Shanghai neighborhood committee worker (call her Mary) who just quit after being on pandemic prevention duty since March 18. “I cannot keep going" she starts. A🧵

March 17

The director of the SH Municipal Health Commission holds a press conference. Mary says she's optimistic about the city's prospects and relays it to her WeChat friends. An emergency meeting is held at night to prepare PCR tests for her entire district on 3/18 & 3/19.

March 18

Mary's district begins the first 48-hour period of a mass testing policy. Mary's team tests everyone & works through the night, compiling and analyzing test data of over 7,000 residents. They sleep on the floor in 2-hour shifts.

March 19

All residents are called to test again in a relatively orderly fashion. Residents comply. That night, Mary's legs are trembling from sleep deprivation, but everyone is still "happy and cheerful"

Then things get bad.

Her district is ordered to do ANOTHER 48-hour lockdown. Then another. Then another. March 22 evening, a resident calls the committee cause an elderly relative faints and needs medical attention.

Mary thinks the old man will be fine as soon as they get in the ambulance. But hospitals aren't operating, and the man, after going to several hospitals with no luck, dies. When news reaches them the next day, Mary wonders if this is just the beginning.

March 30

Mary's done 7 rounds of testing in her district. Volunteers have grown. As district-wide test results come in, more positive cases pop up around her neighboring districts — shutting them down entirely —and Mary's district registers its first positive case.

In one of her rounds in late March, Mary observes only having only two test sites for 7,000 residents. "No matter how much protection we have in place, this will not stop Omicron from spreading" she writes.

Mary suggests that the mass testing spread the virus: "The fact is that a neighborhood that had been testing negative for 12 days began to turn positive, with new positive cases coming in every day."

"I felt our work and our sleepless nights were wasted."

Mary's district has 3 cases and she is asked quarantine and work from home. This leaves her team even more understaffed. One family of 3 has parents who were positive and a child who was negative. But transport vehicles to the quarantine "camps" only take positive cases.

Mary tries to arrange for the child's grandmother, who lives in another complex to take care of the kid while parents are away — while unsure if that is "allowed" by the CDC policies. It wasn't. They wait all night calling superiors and by morning an exception is made.

Understaffed, Mary's team loses control of the positive cases. The virus spreads to property management and her team. "The leak in the neighborhood was really big, bigger than the superiors thought, so big we could no longer control it, so big that my team was all wiped out."

The policy in the building with positive cases deteriorates: it's now just an indefinite lockdown. "No one knows what the policy is, including myself, a committee worker," she writes. Mary notes she has no food to eat, and cannot buy groceries online (like everyone else.)

Testing for the covid-positive building stops as more staff test positive and doctors refuse to even enter. Mary begins to breakdown faced with the loss of control and chaos with food shortages in the neighborhood. The committee was helpless to solve it and the CDC had no policy

Things get worse. A family of four tests positive for covid. Mary convinces them that centralized quarantine would be better for them and the building as she's confident there is more medical staff and essential supplies there. The family heeds her advice. She's totally wrong.

2 days later the mother calls. She's crying saying the quarantine "camp" was on a construction site mired in dust. The family lived in a container-like room with no toilet paper, sporadic meals, and no doctor. CDC asks why they came in the first place and tells them go back home.

Mary is horrified and tries everything she can to help the family to no avail. "I'm horrified not by the lack of pandemic management or the lack of basic essentials, but by the repeated deception, the repeated concealment and endless waiting"

"Why is the neighborhood committee forced to carry the entire burden? If I could have instructed doctors and hospitals, then I could have saved the old man on March 22. If I could have instructed the CDC, I would have told them to stop the endless nucleic acid tests ASAP."

"If I could arrange for transport vehicles, I would have been the first person to bring the residents back home from the disaster. But we have no rights, no resources, only exhausted volunteers faced with the abuse of residents who think we are impotent to solve the problem."

#Shanghai #Covid