Denis Staunton: Covid easing in Beijing is a burden lost, a stone gone from your shoe

Few of the skaters on Beijing’s frozen Liangma river canal wore skates but that did not stop them sliding cheerfully across its surface, glittering under the brilliant winter sun. A tiny child sat in a green plastic crate only a little bigger than a flower pot, giving orders to a slightly older girl who was tugging it along at the end of a leash.

An older man and a woman sailed past on a couple of folding chairs that had been converted into sleds with narrow planks of wood serving as runners. Beyond them a father and his daughter were playing a form of ice hockey with plastic sticks, using a shuttlecock for a puck.

Just over a month ago, this place was the scene of an hours-long demonstration, one of many across China calling for an end to lockdowns and coronavirus testing. The zero-Covid policy was abandoned a few days later and the virus ripped through Beijing infecting most of its people, including everyone I know.

Coming back after a few weeks outside China, I still had to spend five days in a quarantine hotel, a requirement that will be scrapped next week. After that, I was supposed to self-isolate at home for three days but when the document arrived releasing me from the hotel, it told me not to bother.

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The city feels refreshed and buoyant as those recovered from coronavirus are revelling in the return to normal life and enjoying the morale boost of surviving an illness. Everyone still wears a mask outdoors as well as inside but small things like not having to scan a health code going into shops and restaurants feel like a burden lost, a stone gone from your shoe.

The last time I had seen Tao was just before the end of zero-Covid when we shared a bowl of bullfrogs in a spicy Sichuan sauce and he asked me if I knew anyone who had had coronavirus. I told him I knew almost nobody who hadn’t and he, who knew no one who had been infected, said he was going to stay well away from me.

A couple of weeks later, he had a temperature of 39.5, a persistent cough and a positive test result that kept him out of action for a week or so. Now he was back at work in a gym, complaining that it was still almost empty most days because people were afraid to come back after recovering from the virus.

“Everybody’s afraid of getting myocarditis,” he said.

“I think it’s all bullshit.”

Some people are still afraid of getting coronavirus itself and another friend told me that she can’t go home for Chinese New Year later this month because her parents are afraid she will infect them. When she went to see her mother this week, her father wouldn’t let her come into the house so she had to stand outside and talk through an open window.

Another woman who is a little older and cautious by nature refused to leave the house from the end of November and ordered all her groceries online. When she tested positive for the virus, she said she could only have picked it up from the delivery bags left outside her door.

Throughout the ordeal, she repeated the official line that the zero-Covid policy had not been dumped abruptly but was being changed step by step in response to scientific evidence. She continued to stay at home even after she started testing negative but she relented this week, telling me when I mentioned a local Yunnan restaurant that she was going there that evening with a friend.

The surge of infections that followed the end of zero-Covid peaked in Beijing last month and hospitals are starting to return to normal. Nobody knows how many people have died because of coronavirus since the restrictions were lifted, partly because the authorities have changed the criteria for attributing deaths to the virus.

Everyone knows that the virus is about to spread from the big cities into smaller ones and to rural areas where the healthcare infrastructure is threadbare and that it will claim many more lives. But most people I spoke to in Beijing this week are pleased that zero-Covid is over and are starting 2023 with a certain amount of hope and a great sense of relief.