As a diehard Celtics fan and casual Drake listener, it’s been a disappointing couple of days to say the least. However, my biggest letdown this week did not come from bad music or an underperforming NBA star, but instead from a positive PCR test for Covid-19.
I understood the risks of traveling in and out of China. Having lived in Shanghai for most of my life, I thought I knew the habits of this infamous “surveillance state” well. I had been in Europe with my mom and we were traveling back. Our flight was to Chengdu, since at this point Shanghai is in total lockdown mode and no international flights are going in. We took all the necessary precautions coming here, taking preliminary PCR and Antigen tests. Each and every test I took returned negative. However, everything somehow changed as soon as I was back in China. My first PCR test at the airport — positive for coronavirus. My second test, taken again in the quarantine hotel just to confirm — positive for coronavirus. And just like that, I was shipped off in an ambulance to a place Chengdu calls a “Health and Public Sanitation Center”.
Giant red cans of antiviral spray followed me everywhere (think the red sprays that firefighters carry around, except with chemicals instead of water). Every step I took was followed by spraying, and upon arrival at the center all of my belongings were thoroughly sprayed again. Because they had moved everyone on my flight to the suburbs to quarantine in a hotel, going back to the city, even in an ambulance cutting through all the traffic lights, took a good two hours. I arrived in a gated, thumbprint-password-protected facility. The nurse assigned to me informed me that precautions had been taken after numerous patients had tried to escape… scary.
To be fair, the conditions in the center itself are okay. I wasn’t sure what I expected a medical quarantine center in Chengdu to look like, but they put me in a pretty standard hospital inpatient room. There’s bed space for four people to a room, but I lucked out as the only patient to be brought in today and essentially have a single. There’s three meals a day and a fairly comfortable place to sleep. The nurses and doctors, who are just doing their jobs and following procedure, are nice people. In the two hours time I had to prepare and pack my stuff before the ambulance arrived to pick me up, there were definitely worse accommodation scenarios I had imagined.
The nurse told me that my medical checkups will start soon. Not sure what that entails, but I will keep updating this blog if you want to follow along my journey. As of now, I’m completely asymptomatic — no fever, no cold, no trouble breathing, nothing at all — so sharing this experience at least helps occupy my time. From the outside, I’ve always wondered what happened to the Covid-positive people forcefully dragged away and put in these types of places, so perhaps this blog will help shed some light on an otherwise pretty un-transparent situation.