I had already written my year-end reflections in late November 2022. At the time, I figured there was still one month left, but what major change could possibly happen in such a short span? I did not expect December to become the most dramatic month of the entire year.
At the beginning of December, everything still pointed toward the continued enforcement of the "dynamic zero-COVID" approach. Policies on the ground were still being carried out according to that standard. From where I stood, there was no visible sign that reopening was imminent, and no clue about when it might happen. Public messaging was also firmly aligned with staying the course.
Then, almost overnight, the policy was completely loosened, and the public narrative shifted just as abruptly. As for why this happened, official channels either did not explain it or did not explain it clearly. Informal interpretations spread everywhere. Some people believed the change was forced, pointing to the white-paper protests. Others thought the real reason was financial exhaustion, that the old system had simply become too costly to sustain.
The first wave of news seemed to come out of Beijing. Suddenly there were far more reports of people getting infected. Messages multiplied quickly: how people had caught it, what symptoms they had, what to do, and what medicines to take.
At that point, I assumed it would take at least another month before it reached the small city where I live in any serious way. Instead, it lagged behind Beijing by only a little over a week. Infections moved steadily closer until, around Christmas, people around me started falling ill one after another. I ended up getting it too.
Because I reacted too slowly, I was not able to buy children’s Motrin or Tylenol in time. Fortunately, I did manage to get ibuprofen for adults. One person after another in my family got infected, but thankfully none of the cases became especially severe. Our main symptoms were high fever, chills, and extreme fatigue. After taking a few ibuprofen tablets and staying in bed for a few days, we gradually recovered.
Jasmine had it worse than the rest of us. She had a fever for two days, along with diarrhea, stomach pain, dizziness, and nausea. It took her a full week to get over it. The child’s symptoms were milder by comparison: a low-grade fever for two or three days, one dose of Motrin that had been opened several months earlier, and then a cough that lasted another week.
When I finally recovered and went outside, the city felt almost deserted. There were very few cars on the road and barely any people in the shops. The most striking change was that the signs requiring people to scan codes at store entrances were gone. No one was standing at the door checking health codes anymore.
After New Year’s Day, going out felt different again. There were more people on the streets, and a sense of bustle had returned. I visited a mall I used to go to often. The security guards at the entrance were gone, the temperature-checking equipment had been removed, and the side doors were open again. Being able to walk in and out freely felt genuinely good.
Inside the mall, though, many stores had already closed. The blow the pandemic dealt to business was still impossible to ignore.
What had weighed on us for three years was finally over. It was no longer some distant hope with no clear end in sight. Over those three years, the mood had changed more than once. At first, it felt like "everyone else is drunk while I alone am sober." Other countries were seeing rising infection numbers, while we insisted on our own path and relied on strong policy enforcement. The results seemed solid, and there were even calls for other countries to copy our approach.
Later, more and more countries reopened while we continued with the same strategy. The feeling turned into something like "everyone else is sober while I alone remain drunk." We still had strong top-down execution and even the capacity for stricter measures at each level. The official line later framed reopening as the outcome of having been protected by the state for three years.
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, I was in high school. Sixteen years later came the COVID outbreak that began in 2019. I had assumed it would pass quickly, the way SARS seemed to. Instead, it lasted three years.
Living through two major epidemics in one lifetime is already enough to make a person uneasy. What worries me most now is not what has happened, but whether something like this will come again.