It is the beginning of November, 2020. I am living in Shanghai, China — COVID-free. Bars, restaurants and cafés are all fully open. So are yoga studios and gyms. There is no need for physical distancing. Some people still wear masks on the street. Masks are still required on the subway.
One of the things that astounds me when I talk to my family and friends back home is that they don’t seem to believe that there is no community transmission of COVID in China (there is actually some, last month a few cases in Qingdao and now in Xinjiang). That somehow, China is covering up the cases. I can’t speak for all of China, but I can tell you that that there is no COVID in Shanghai (with as much confidence as one can know anything). I have two lines of evidence. First, COVID is highly contagious. With all the bars, restaurants, gyms, etc. open, if there was COVID here, people that I know personally would be getting sick. No one is getting sick. Second, I know people who work in the COVID designated hospitals. When people arrive on planes with fevers they are taken to those hospitals and the numbers are publicly reported. The public numbers always match with the first hand information I hear from my personal connections.
So how does Shanghai (and the rest of China) manage this? The first line of defense is mandated supervised quarantine. Everyone who arrives from overseas is escorted from the airport to a hotel where they are essentially imprisoned for 2 weeks (people caring for small children or the elderly can apply to do the quarantine at home, but it is up to the district whether or not to allow home-quarantine). People pay for their own hotel costs. Everyone gets a COVID test (for free) when they arrive and before they are allowed to leave the hotel. Their temperature is monitored daily. If at anytime they have symptoms they will be taken to a hospital. I personally went through home quarantine for two weeks when I returned to China in March, with my wife and infant son. Twice every day someone came to our apartment in a hazmat suit and took our temperatures. Someone else took away our trash that we left by the door. A device was placed on our door that texted public health officials every time the door was opened. The second line of defense is real contact tracing. Everyone has an app or two that tracks where you have been. If someone that you have been in contact with in the last two weeks has a positive covid test you will be place under supervised quarantine. It is not required that you use the app, but if you don’t you may be restricted from entering some places (hospitals, government buildings, etc). The third line is massive testing. In Qiandao, 9 million people were tested in 5 days after just 3 positive cases.
So why can’t the west copy this strategy?
Let’s leave aside the US, which is currently f#$%^ed.
I’m Canadian. Let’s focus on Canada. The most common response I get from friends and family back home about mandated supervised quarantine is that “Canadians won’t agree to that”. I find this very strange. Most of us do not need to travel internationally at this time. Once COVID is under control the quarantine rules only affect international travelers. Let me restate that: in Shanghai, a city with a population about the same as all of Canada, except for arriving travelers, no one has had to undergo quarantine, because there is no community transmission of COVID. Why would the vast majority of Canadians choose to live in fear of getting sick, deal with fluctuating school openings/closings, massive economic stress, etc. in order to “protect” the freedom of international travelers? At this point, in order to control COVID there would have to be around 1 month of serious lockdown + testing + contact tracing + mandatory supervised quarantine of anyone with positive tests. It would be a hard month. If they had done this in April, it would be over with. Instead, this is going to be drawn out until there is an effective vaccine. That could be next Spring or 2025 or never! We don’t have a vaccine for the cold! We don’t have a vaccine for HIV! Just because scientists are working on a vaccine doesn’t mean there will be an effective one soon (I hope there is, but hope doesn’t stop pandemics). The 2nd thing I read is that the Canadian government thought that mass testing was too expensive. What morons! Whatever the costs, surely it is cheaper than the losses of lives, health costs, lost jobs and wages, etc. When Trudeau was elected I remember him committing to running an “evidence based” government. All the experts, since before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic have said again and again that testing, tracing and isolation is the basis for controlling the disease.
People have also mentioned the privacy fears around contact tracing apps. This is also bizarre. Your credit card company and mobile company already know practically everything about you. You just have to give them permission to use that information for the sake of public health. Just like Finland did, you can get guarantees from the government that the tracing information will not be used for immigration, tax, crime, etc., only for public health. The information can also be wiped after two weeks.
The reason I felt compelled to write this is that I feel that Canadians have been gaslit to believe that it is “impossible” to control COVID-19 and that the Canadian government is doing the best they can. They are not! Canadians should demand more from the government and from each other. It is possible to endure short term pain for the long term gain.
