This is a continuation of a series of posts that I wrote in the Spring of 2020, when I left China at the outset of the Covid epidemic. At that time is was called Coronavirus, which as a name seems kind of antiquated. In Chinese its name is 新冠, or Xīnguān, 'new crown,' literally, referring to the spiky shape of the virus and the fact that at that time, it was a 'novel' corona virus. Once again I've left China to be back in the States, escaping not so much the virus but the lockdowns implemented over the course of this Spring. 'Running' is still an apt verb. This time, however, I will be in the States for a year before heading back to China as I have a pre-tenure sabbatical such that I don't need to teach or do service for my university. Right now I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, staying at my parents house. All summer I will be taking trips, visiting folks that I haven't gotten a chance to see for the last 18 or so months before I head to Charlottesville, Virginia in August where I will be a visiting scholar in the religious studies department for the 2022-23 academic year. That's another story, but I wanted to revisit the some of the questions that I was writing about a couple years ago; specifically, the question of which Covid response, US vs. China, has turned out to be the most effective.
From the late Spring of 2020 until the Spring of 2022, Covid in China has been more or less absent. There were some cities that had a smattering of cases, mostly cities that bordered other countries such as Myanmar and Russia or places that were receiving international travelers via airports such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, etc. After my 2020 layover in the States, I came back to China in the Fall of 2020, September 30th to be exact. After quarantining a month, two weeks in a hotel and then two loose weeks in my apartment, I went back out in the world and resumed a mostly normal life. I had to add a few health apps to my phone and occasionally wear a mask but asides from that, life within China's borders was much like it was previous to Covid. That said, because it was so difficult to get into China, including getting a visa, a reasonable flight, and by the Winter of 2020, passing a battery of Covid tests to get on the flight; because it was so difficult to get into China my university was adversely affected, where nearly all of our international students could not get visas to get (back) into China and many of our faculty who had left at the outset of Covid were not able to get back in, usually because of the strict visa restrictions placed on spouses and kids. Online courses, hybrid courses, and Zoom became the new normal and to this day, two and a half years after the initial outbreak, this is still the norm for our internationally focused university. We felt and will continue to deal with the impacts of Covid for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, in the US, lots of people died. I don't think it's necessary to go deep into the reasons for this, as anyone reading I assume is well versed in either the news coming out of the US or lived through the experience first-hand. But, briefly, I'd say that political polarization, the Trump administration, comically selfish insistence on individual rights, confusing public health communication, and mass media hysteria all contributed to the massive failure that was the US-American response to Covid. Yet, in the States, things have for the most part returned to normal. Masks in some places and vaccination requirements, but people are more or less back out and doing the things they did before all this happened. I write this from a coffee shop, the only folks wearing masks are the folks coming in from the outside to pick up an order. And Madison is a blue city, one where folks generally went along with all the recommended health guidelines, including getting vaccinated. Whereas, in China, emerging from its second major lockdown, there is no foreseeable end to the unflinchingly strict Covid policies. One the one hand China has done supremely well with combatting Covid but on the other, China's zero-tolerance policies have made it nearly impossible for China to 'live with' Covid and reopen its borders.
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