I used to be proud of Shanghai because I have been in Shanghai for 35+ years and I was born here. But this time, it‘s totally an exception. I’m shamed of Shanghai lockdown. This article will show you what happened in Shanghai during the lockdown.
The lockdown happened from Mar, 2022 to early June, 2022. It was just like a fiction movie. Frankly speaking, what was happening during Shanghai lockdown also shocked me. It’s not Shanghai at all I used to know before.
One of my ex-colleague Trung from US worried about me after watching some news about Shanghai lockdown on TV, he contact me on Linkedin then. It looks that Shanghai lockdown and poor management from the government surprised the whole world.
What means lockdown
- All the shops and supermarkets are closed and enclosed with blue and yellow bars
- Most streets are splitted in region by bars.
- Compounds are totally closed (no one in and no one out) in order to avoid unnecessary people interaction.
How we buy food while shops and supermarkets are closed
Since all the nearby shops are closed, we start group-buy things from some individuals (who are merchaniser) in order to get enough food and life essentials.
For example, you have to buy at least 30 to 50 pieces for one kind of product (such as pork, milk). In each block, we have a few group-buy leaders. They will try their best to find different source of products. We are establishing a few merchaniser-to-compound channels in order to do group buying.
We create a few WeChat groups to manage the people who wanna buy food. Each wechat group is usually just for one food. This is to ease the management.
Can we buy food from ecommence app?
The simple answer is no.
Although the news from government says we can buy food from supermarket online apps (such as Dingdong Food Buying App), it’s almost an impossible mission. Since these kind of apps are only designed for non-lockdown mode. It cannot support too many users to bid at same moment. However, a lot of people get up very early (5 a.m.) in order to get some food from Dingdong or JD app. But it’s still too hard.
Although young people can get food from apps and group buy, elder people are not easy to get food with these channels because they are NOT good at mobile apps. In this case, some elders even died due to lack of food although we are helping elder people to get food as we can.
Daily Covid Test
We are forced by the government to do daily covid test at least once. This was very annoying event happening. The covid tests were done by volunteers inside the compound. According to the government, this can somewhat help prevent further infection from aliens.
There is a joke say that I’m not here to ensure I’m not positive. Instead, I’m here to test until I get positive. And then you can send me to the cabin.
