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The first hours of Johana Gómez unpacking her suitcases at the hotel in the city of Chengdu, where she would spend 14 days in quarantine, passed with the room door open. The hotel staff asked her five times to lock her room, but she resisted. He was afraid to do so because of the stories he had read in the WhatsApp group of travelers ‘Waiting to return to Beijing’, which he joined from Germany at the time he decided that he would undertake the journey back to China, the country where he has lived for some time. 9 months with his family.
“I joined that chat because I wanted to know what the quarantine was like, how other people lived, and if there was useful data,” he says. In the end everything is uncertain, everything changes according to the area and the assigned hotel.
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“I had read that in some hotels they passed by locking the doors of the rooms, and that generated a great sense of anguish. Only after noticing that everyone was asleep did I have the confidence to close my door ”.
In the last official report of the week, China registers 733 cases and 3 deaths throughout the country, a great advance considering that in April it reached the number of 1,293 daily deaths. How has China managed to contain a new wave of coronavirus? With several very strict measures. Such as the use of mandatory face masks, tracking of infections with applications and the prohibition of foreigners from entering the country for three months, among other actions, which resulted in very few cases of local transmission since August.
Now the spread control approach is highly concentrated on those who enter the country, which is why a 14-day quarantine is mandatory, regardless of nationality or country of origin from which you enter Chinese territory.
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The hotel
Arriving at a hotel randomly selected by the Government and serving a quarantine is part of the measures that travelers arriving from abroad must follow. Nobody has the option of choosing the hotel, for which, in addition, they must pay.
The hotel that I got was comfortable, “decent”, says Johana; However, when he arrived he did not know how much he would have to pay for the night, or if the food was included.
The matter operates in a very organized way. As soon as the passengers get off the plane, they are separated into groups, and after answering questionnaires and presenting evidence, they are directed on buses to hotels prepared for quarantine. Johana’s hotel cost, on average, 280 yuan a night, including breakfast, equivalent to 148,000 Colombian pesos.
The rooms are assigned individually and in the case of families, parents are divided with children. There are never groups in a room. “I think it would have been hard for me to have been separated from one of my children, fortunately I had to do the quarantine alone”, says this Bogota woman married to a German who works for the automotive sector and with whom she has two children.
After 9 years of living in Germany, her husband’s company offered them a transfer to China in June 2019. They arrived in Beijing in February with some prevention due to the news of the virus, without imagining that the first months would be going through a rigorous quarantine in the country where the pandemic that put the world in check began.
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Johana Gómez has lived with her family in Beijing (China) for nine months.
The odyssey
During that time he had to postpone some pending work commitments in Stuttgart, but in September he made the decision to temporarily return to Germany to finish them. And that’s where this whole story started. “To achieve my return to China from Germany I had to present a PCR test with a negative result taken 72 hours before the flight, which I also had to pay, and send the result to the Chinese embassy, which returns the certificate by email ”. It is the go-ahead to start the odyssey.
At the German airport the procedures were normal: taking the temperature, presenting the test results and the normal documentation. However, when boarding the Air China plane things seem stricter. All flight personnel are protected with biosecurity suits and implements from head to toe, and they try to have minimal contact with passengers.
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The food, delivered on boarding, is cold and fully packed, and each person receives enough bottles of water to avoid having to ask for more during the flight. The environment is cold, both in treatment and in temperature, because the heating is off and there are no covers for hygiene measures. “I chose to travel with a Chinese airline due to the high fines they have to pay in case a traveler infected with covid-19 is detected on any of their flights, that represents more security to avoid contagion.”
The experience of entering Germany was very different, where there was no quarantine nor did they ask for the test with a negative result, since China is considered a country with a very low risk.
Already on Chinese soil, in Chengdu – because on two occasions her flight to Beijing was canceled, which she does not think accidental – and after disembarking and separating into groups, You have to fill out a form in which travelers are asked to tell what places they visited in the last two weeks, if they have presented any symptoms related to covid-19 and the data of the destination in China, among other information. While this is happening, airport personnel are constantly spraying travelers with disinfectant. Then they take two tests: one for the nose and the other for the throat; and they continue with the migration process.
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All Air China flight personnel are duly protected with head-to-toe suits and other biosecurity accessories. Dealing with passengers is minimal.
The airport is divided into sectors where travelers on domestic flights never mix with international ones, who remain in an empty area where they only have access to buses that will take them directly to the hotel. Silence reigns in the environment. “I think the craziest thing about the experience for me was when I arrived at the hotel and after another disinfection they immediately took away my passport at the reception. At that moment I thought: ‘Well, now I can’t leave here, not even because I despair of being locked up.’ In exchange they receive the room card, and each one goes up directly with their suitcases.
Everything in the corridors is wrapped in plastic and each room has a chair outside where food is left, which can be from the hotel or from an external address. Inside there is a large water box for about a week and enough toiletries to avoid having to ask for anything during the 14 days of the quarantine. There is practically no communication with anyone. Neither with the hotel people nor with the other guests. “There is only the option of communicating with someone at the reception by WeChat, but several times my requests were not answered,” says the Colombian.
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The feeling of being on a very strict regimen is always present. Every day at 10 am and 3 pm they spend taking the temperature, and they bring food three times a day without asking. You can order things from outside, but they are only distributed at 12:30 pm and 6:30 pm
As the days went by, communication was the greatest difficulty faced by this artist and theater costume designer from Bogotá, who is just beginning to learn Mandarin. “In the front room there was a young Chinese man whom I noticed from the plane that he spoke German. One day, while they were taking our temperature, I tried to make contact with him through signals because he needed help to order food and I tried to get just a little closer, but he got very scared and closed the door pointing out that there was a camera recording in the corridor ” .
“It is a shock when you come from a country like Germany. I feel that there people do things more out of conviction and here, of course, there is conviction, but there is also fear, that of knowing that it is something that should not be done, that it is in the culture, because there is more control, a lot surveillance and information about people and about what happens around the covid. In Germany people take care of themselves, but they try to live with the virus by letting normality flow. In China there are other rules, here they simply do not want the virus and do everything to avoid it.
The 14 days of isolation and solitude were spent between activities such as reading, exercising, drawing, sewing and many hours of sleep. After several days and due to the change in time zone, there is not much difference between day and night. It was all about waiting.
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Hotel furniture is protected with plastic and food is delivered to a chair at the door of each room three times a day at fixed times
The tranquility
Johana’s experience reaffirmed her idea of never traveling outside of China for a long time, less now that she can move with ease in a country where she feels safe from the virus. “I want to take advantage of the possibility of living normally. My children returned to school since September, and so far no contagion has been reported there. My children can live more freely and calmly in the face of all this situation ”.
Every day at night, Johana takes the temperature of the two children and enters it in a government application. “Very few parents have decided not to send their children to study. The truth is that adjusting to control is difficult, but when I finally return home to Beijing, I realize that all that control makes my life easier. My children have a normal childhood and since they are small they go without a mask. I can continue with my daily life, I have to wear a mask indoors, but not on the street, it is no longer a requirement ”.
Today in China, after a year of the report of the first case of covid-19, life is very similar to true normality. “Even though I had to bear all the costs, I now understand that it is a measure that makes sense. I decided to leave the country and expose myself to bring the disease. Quarantine was not pretty, but it has to do with the others. And here the rules are fulfilled ”.
(Keep reading: ‘Government must warn citizens of potential vaccine risks’).
ANDREA MORENO
Instagram @andreamphoto
