Before the pandemic, neighbourhood committees did not have much power. Now, they can confine people to their houses for weeks
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskMs Gao’s tireless efforts were in response to an outbreak that most countries would consider trivial. Hangzhou, with 12m people, had recorded just 54 symptomatic cases of covid in the two weeks before her fall. Overall, China has logged around 27,000 new local symptomatic cases in March, fewer than America recorded most days this month. Still, it is the biggest outbreak in China since the early days of the pandemic .
A neighbourhood committee member might, for example, ask a person who has just travelled from another city to take a test or stay inside for a few days. During targeted lockdowns of, say, a housing compound, they control who gets to go where. Smaller cities, of 5m people or fewer, are supposed to be able to test everyone in just two days. That involves a lot of door-to-door visits by committee members, as well as volunteers who organise people in queues.
If some people are frustrated with the state’s zero-covid footsoldiers, it is perhaps because there are so many of them—and they don’t always co-ordinate. A person might receive a call from several different officials: one from where they work, another from where they live and yet another from where they have been recently. The police, neighbourhood committees and businesses work the phones, too, checking on people’s whereabouts. Scammers have tried to take advantage of the situation.
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