The New Yellow Peril
Let’s start by saying, I am 100% in favour of the Dynamic Covid Zero Policy but there are some issues and they can cause some problems, especially if we don’t understand the different policies of the different places. I also want to emphasis that, for the most part, what went wrong in this story went wrong because of a mistake we made, not because of the system breaking down. The system is highly efficient but, if you’re a foreigner, there are gaps in the management of it. Making a mistake and being a foreigner can lead to the sort of adventures, and stresses we went through over the last few days.
Three weeks ago, without any idea that it would cause me any issues at all, I visited Guangzhou, normally, that wouldn’t be a problem and it wasn’t. But I did need to scan the Covid19 health codes a couple of times and my presence was registered. I remained there two nights before travelling home on a Tuesday morning. At that time, small pockets of Guangzhou were listed as medium or high-risk areas and by small, I mean some individual buildings and a couple of streets spread out over a city of almost 20 million people. I describe lockdowns in China, with one or two notable exceptions, as being quite surgical and limited to very small pockets of the population.
I had a plan to visit Hainan Island for some meetings the following week and, because Guangzhou has had some cases of Covid, I delayed the flight from Monday to Tuesday afternoon, so I would not have an itinerary that showed me in Guangzhou in the previous 7 days.
Wrong, the itinerary updates at midnight; so, my morning in Guangzhou was still registered as less than 7 days prior and therefore I needed to take a Covid test. Everyone who arrives on Hainan Island needs a test so that was ok but, for my wife, she was able to take a test and walk through; for me, because I’d been in a “medium-risk” area in the preceding 7 days, I needed to take the test and wait in the airport, under an elevated highway until the results were available, nearly three hours later. Not a good start as the people meeting us, as well as my wife had to wait for me in the car park until my result came through.
The electronic, scanned method of registering for Chinese people, needs to be done manually for foreigners because many different systems around the country don’t recognise a passport number. I needed a test; I got one but it took much longer for me than it does for citizens. Once done, there was no problem, at least not for that one but being in a different province would “bite us on the backside” later.
The following day, we drove three hours from Haikou to Sanya and registered in another hotel and, being in another city, there’s a requirement to get another test. Which we dutifully did. Except this time the problem was that the registration was incorrectly recorded. Many Chinese people are a little confused by our names, (about as confused as we are by their names, if the truth be known) and my family name Grey, is often recorded as Gery, or my family name is recorded last, after my first and middle names so my family name becomes John. This isn’t usually a problem and we can spot it, correct it as they manually enter it but this one was slightly different, she spelt the names right, they were in the correct order but she didn’t put a space between my family name and my given name. We pointed this out and she said, if I put a space there, the system won’t have enough space. Well, guess what? The system didn’t recognise it and 12 hours later, I was still waiting for a result and it looked like we wouldn’t be flying home the next morning.
That problem was resolved by attending the local hospital at 7:30am, paying for a private test, instead of the regular free test — it cost 15RMB, that’s less than $2:00. The results were available in two hours and we were able to catch our 12-noon flight. However, in a cruel twist of irony, our host had made some calls and found out how to get the original test onto my phone and voila, now I had two covid test result to fly with. On arrival in Zhuhai, I was tested again and, on arrival in Zhongshan, I was tested again. I’m not sure if that’s a record but 4 tests in 36 hours was definitely a record for me.
Now, all we needed to do was get two tests in three days and all would be well. Which it was. But for us, there was an additional complication, we were catching a train to Hunan, another province on Monday again. This time we checked. We’d been in Haikou, Sanya, Zhuhai and Zhongshan in the previous 8 days, none of these places were medium or high-risk zones so we should be ok. We needed a 24-hour test result to get on the train and the last of our two-within-three-day tests coincided so that was good. On Monday morning, we caught the train with everything looking good.
We were travelling to Zhuzhou, a smaller city in Hunan and were a little surprised when the train we were on went through Zhuzhou, which is 25 minutes South of Changsha, people were meeting us in Changsha and taking us back to Zhuzhou, they had told us to go to Changsha, not realising that the Zhongshan train stopped at Zhuzhou. The two cities are very close so it wasn’t a serious error but it was a mistake that was going to cost us dearly.
We arrived at the Changsha South train station, got off, through the usual preliminaries before leaving the station and were required to take a Covid test. All no problem, we’re used to that, we’ll also need one in Zhongshan when we get back… (at the time of writing this I was wondering: if we would ever get back!)
Had we arrived in Zhuzhou and taken a test, we would have travelled around the city for two days, taken another test before going home and all would have been well. We made the mistake of thinking the Changsha test was acceptable. It wasn’t. When we moved out of Changsha and entered another city, we were obliged to get two tests in three days. This was our first, and probably only serious mistake and would not normally have created any problems because after spending the next two days in a small Zhuzhou town called Liling, we started our journey back to Changsha, where we planned to get a test and spend another two days in the city before heading home.
That plan was dashed when it was announced that Zhuzhou had an outbreak of Covid19. There were 19 new cases reported the evening before and now Zhuzhou has been declared a medium risk destination. But we were in a car when this happened on the way to Changsha. We didn’t know how this would affect us until we hit the outskirts of the Changsha and came off the freeway. We were stopped, our codes were checked we were asked where we’d come from and when we said Liling, they said: “that’s in Zhuzhou so you can’t enter Changsha. And, there’s a Covid19 test station over there, go and get tested. After that, return to Zhuzhou city.”
So, we returned to Zhuzhou, checked into a different hotel still with a 48-hour code from our test in Changsha and waiting for a new test result which would come through soon from a test centre at the side of the road, then went to have lunch. During lunch, our green codes turned yellow. Of course, this is not something you notice happening and we weren’t even aware it had happened. We got back to the hotel and because we were guests, didn’t need to scan the code, we could show the room card and they recognised us so, we went straight to the room. Had we, or they, known about the yellow code we wouldn’t have been allowed entry we would need to report to the local community, arrange a test and be isolated.
About 7pm, Ann got a message, I got one a few minutes later. Effectively what the message said was: you have not had two tests in three days since arriving in Zhuzhou… We were shocked, we’d had two tests in three days but the first was in Changsha and the results of the second, on the outskirts of Zhuzhou, hadn’t registered yet. So, we were in Hunan, the same province, with one invalid test for the city and one pending result.
It needs to be pointed out that the test in the morning, about 11am, had it registered, would have prevented the QR code turning yellow but, with mass testing and a small city just navigating its first outbreak, it’s inevitable that there would be some delays in getting test results through.
The yellow code is serious. Hotels can’t accept us but we were already in one, public transport can’t take us and, even entering places like hospitals can be very difficult without local community assistance.
First, we informed the hotel reception, they told us we have to leave. But where do we go and how do we get there? They provided the name of a hotel which can accept isolation cases, a telephone number of the local community to arrange transportation and told us to be ready to leave.
We called that hotel, sorry, they said: “we don’t take foreigners.” We called the community telephone number, 8 times, it was either busy or rang out each time. Obviously, this was a new outbreak and a developing situation in Zhuzhou so they were, understandably, extremely busy.
So, after two hours of trying we called the reception again. What can we do, we can’t leave because we can’t hang around in the street with a yellow code, we can’t get public transport with a yellow code and we can’t order a private hire car or a taxi with a yellow code, the hotel you’ve recommended won’t take foreigners, no matter what code.
By now, it was after 9pm, we ordered some food to be delivered to the hotel in the hope that, the arrival of food would spur the action of something, anything is better than sitting in a hotel packed and ready but with nowhere to go and, sure enough, it did. The moment we started eating the phone rang, it was an official from the Foreign Affairs Bureau, a Mr. Li.
Several questions and he had all he needed to know but was adamant we needn’t worry and we could stay in the same hotel, he would arrange that and get back to us.
Before we went to sleep, Mr. Li called us to check on the codes, they were still yellow and the test we had earlier in the day, at the side of the road, still hadn’t posted the results — this was, we found out, the first time that Zhuzhou has needed to carry out mass testing on the entire population, so late results were to be expected.
On waking up, we found we were still yellow but our most recent test results were now 24 hours and three days. Finally, we were compliant. However, under normal rules, we’re required to get 3 tests in 7 days to remove a yellow QR code. At 7:30am, Mr. Li was already working on a special case for us. We had taken so many tests in recent days, all negative of course. In fact, it was a total of 8 tests in 10 days for me and 7 in the same period for my wife but we were still non-complaint for the local situation.
11am, Mr. Li called and asked us to check our codes, the news was both good and bad. Mine was still yellow but my wife had turned to green. As I looked at it, a new message appeared. It said: please go to a vaccination centre and get a vaccination as soon as possible. This was new, first of all, I’m fully vaccinated and boosted, secondly, there are no vaccine mandates in China, were they telling me that the only way to remove the yellow code is to be vaccinated? If so, this would go against everything that I’ve been told, or believed to be true about China.
We checked. There is no record of me being vaccinated on the Hunan QR code system but no, it wasn’t a requirement but strongly worded advice, in fact so strongly worded that it looked just like a requirement. I went into my Guangdong health code information and there it was, full records of the date, the time, the vaccine I’d taken on the first, second and third events. But, and here’s a problem only foreigners will experience in China, my vaccinations were all given to me before my new passport was issued in June this year. So, I’m travelling on my new passport and Hunan had checked that passport number. Luckily, because I’m aware this could be an issue, I also carry my old passport. I sent a photo of the old one to them and waited but then it all changed again.
We had taken a test by the side of the road at 11:24am in Changsha my wife’s code was green and she was good to go, the first available train is at 5:59pm but my code was still yellow so it was not looking like we were going to be free to get it, however, if she wanted to, in theory my wife could go home.
Except she couldn’t. It was now 11:30 and our 24-hour code had now turned into a 36-hour code — this is something Guangdong doesn’t have. In Guangdong a 24-hour code starts at the time of the result and remains there until the 48th hour. Hunan’s 24-hour period starts at the time of the test, not the result and remains there until 24 hours later when it turns to 36 hours. So, Ann’s green QR code was helpful, she could now go to the hospital, get a test but couldn’t catch a train until the result was known. I was still yellow so couldn’t move.
At 1pm, my code was turned to green. I’d been checking every five minutes, even less probably but this was good news, we were now free to go out, get tested and have everything resolved. Except we weren’t.
In a classic case of catch 22 we went to the reception and showed them the green codes, there was a great deal of relief on both sides of the counter. Now, we asked: where is the nearest testing station?
Just over 1 kilometre away, it should take 10 to 15 minutes to walk there. We’d been cooped up longer than 24 hours and it was a lovely sunny day so that sounded like a great idea. We left the hotel, walked for 20 minutes arrived at the place where the centre was located only to find the centre shut. A very unhelpful security officer advised us in a most grumpy manner that they’re all closed today, they were open yesterday but not open today. You need to go to the hospital.
OK, let’s do that, we checked the map on the phone, the hospital is 7 kilometres away, let’s order a Didi car. Nope, impossible! No private hire cars, no taxis and no public transport will be available in the city until at least 5th November, this was still the 2nd of November.
We walked back to the hotel advised the receptionist and she said she’d heard this was true but didn’t know; well, after we’d just walked 2.5 kilometres, she now had her confirmation!
Can the hotel help us? No, they have cars but they have no drivers available. So here we were in a hotel reception with a green code but if we don’t get a test in the next 24 hours it will turn yellow again.
We called our hosts in Zhuzhou, the people who had invited us there. There were three of them, from a local university. Two of them were in their homes and not allowed out, one of them was in his home in the same district and not locked down, he agreed to come and get us, take us to the hospital for a test and wait to bring us back to the hospital.
About 3pm, we arrived at the hospital and joined a line of a few hundred people waiting for their tests outside the main building of the hospital. We scanned the appropriate information but my code wouldn’t work. Hospitals, throughout China, all have their own independent system. If you’re a resident with an ID card, you can get onto the system, if you’re a foreigner with a passport, you need to be manually entered. We got to the front of the queue and were told my phone won’t register, we need to go into the hospital, register with the accounting office. Which we did. So far, an inconvenience but not a major drama. The drama was still to come.
We registered, I got a hospital card, I have one of these for Zhongshan, where I live, as well as Beijing, Chongqing, and several other places due to this system, all, except Zhongshan, cards I will never use again! Using this card, we went to a machine to swipe and pay. We couldn’t. We needed to get a doctor to sign off on it. We wandered the corridors until we found a doctor’s office and he happily signed off. Back now to the accounting desk. No problems now, she scanned my payment QR code, deducted 15:97 RMB which paid for my hospital card and my Covid test and we were ready to go… Except we weren’t.
I went into the App for the test and found the App wouldn’t accept my name. According to the system, my full name didn’t fit between 2 and 16 characters, except that it does. My full name, including spaces is exactly 16 characters. How the system had overcome this 2 days before when we were on the side of the road outside Changsha was to spell my middle name with 2 characters and the number 3 as in “Jo3”. But the hospital has a different system and wouldn’t accept either my name with or without spaces, with the 3 or even the full name which was indeed, we counted them, 16 characters.
You need to go to the second floor the accountant said. So, off we dutifully went to the second floor, found the desk we were supposed to report to and showed them the problem. That’s not right they said, except that it was. What was hospital policy and completely acceptable under it, was not happening to my phone, the same message kept coming up: your name must be between 2 and 16 characters. They had no idea how to overcome the problem and we had even less.
Finally, a young lady, in what I would describe as a nurse’s uniform, was called, apparently, she’d helped a foreigner a few days ago and that had all worked out well. She took us to another desk, we waited, long discussions, my phone was taken from me and investigated by several different people, none of whom had a clue what they were looking at because my phone is in English and none of them could understand it. After about 20 minutes of this my phone was handed back to me and the “nurse” said, in English: follow me.
We did, back down to the accounting desk, she gave me a rebate of the 15:97 RMB onto my phone and said, in English: follow me, again.
We did, again, across the hallway to a room where two police officers were sitting. I wasn’t sure where this was going but she seemed friendly enough so I wasn’t worried. About one minute later another nurse arrived and she swabbed the throat of the two police officers. Then she swabbed mine and my wife’s. We were finally tested but I still hadn’t got the App on my phone. Don’t worry she said, tomorrow morning, I will come here, take a photo of your test result and send it to you. This was great news, the time was now just after 4pm and we were free to leave the hospital, return to the hotel and relax for the first time in what felt like forever but had actually only been about 36 hours.
We had been told by the Foreign Affairs Bureau that there was a possibility that the train station would close so it’s a good idea to go there and check. We did, our driver was very patient, he drove us there, we checked the station was still open and they had no information that it would close but of course that might change at any time. We could book a ticket but we couldn’t enter the station until we had our test results and even then, they must be in a 24-hour period to be valid. So, we left the station, went back to the hotel, ordered some food (and a bottle of French wine from the local Metro store, delivered to the hotel only 75 rmb).
During a very pleasant evening, we ate, drank wine, booked tickets for a train at 10:09 the following morning and generally had a nice relaxing evening. We checked our phones before sleeping, the test results were not there. I wasn’t expecting mine to be, we thought we would need the paper copy so that was alright but it was a bit of a concern that Ann’s was not there.
We went to sleep, a little troubled but the wine helped 😊 and woke up at 7:30am to the sound of the alarm and nothing else, the streets outside were deserted as the city was still in lockdown.
Ann’s 24-hour test result was still not there. The test we had taken at the side of the road had slipped into the 48-hour mode and would shortly pass the three-day point. Meaning it was useless for anything.
We contacted our “nurse” she said not to worry, it would probably be there about 8am and she would check anyway (they work long hours there). 8am came and went, no news, 9am arrived and our deadline for catching the 10:09 train was to leave the hotel before 9:15 in order to get to the station and pass the appropriate checks for health and security.
9:15 came and went, the deadline was gone, we cancelled the tickets and got most of the money back. But still we had no 24-hour code.
Suddenly Ann exclaimed: it’s here! Her code was green her test results were 24 hours. Mine were not. She contacted the hospital and the nurse explained because Ann was in the proper system, with everyone else who had scanned, her test result had come through faster. However, there was a small problem — it would expire at 3:20pm. About 30 minutes later, Ann received a photograph from the nurse. My test result was in and we were both negative and both free to leave.
She booked us on a train leaving at 16:07 and we knew we needed to be at the station before 3:20 or Ann wouldn’t be allowed in. I could enter right up to 16:07, exactly the same time as our train would leave was the time my 24 hours expired. This wasn’t a problem, we arranged with our host/driver to pick us up at 2pm, we told the hotel we would be checking out at 2pm and now it looked like everything was finally going to work out ok.
About 1:50pm we had packed everything and we left the room heading for the elevator. We bumped into another guest who said: where are you going? We replied heading home to Zhongshan. He said: you can’t, the city is closed. What! Closed, how can that be?
We travelled down in the lift and he told us he’d tried to leave the city the day before but was stopped and turned around, the same thing that had happened to us two days before. But we’d been to the train station and checked so we were a little less concerned, he was talking about roads, we were going by train and besides, the train ticketing system had sold us the ticket, surely, if there are no trains stopping in the city there would be no tickets available.
Reception, when we were checking, out told us the same thing. We think the city is closed. We didn’t care, we were going to try the station anyway. They also asked if we had the 24-hour code and we confirmed we did. You’re lucky, another guest went to get the test yesterday morning and got their result 26 hours later meaning that the moment the test result arrived it was already useless to the guest. So, it seems the system in place for hospital staff in which we were tested was actually better than the system for the general public; that was reassuring.
So, we got into the car, drove the 20 minutes to the train station and were dropped off at the door. Xiao Zhang, our helpful host and driver said he would wait until we had gone through the health check and into the station before he drove away. If there were no trains, the health checking officer would just tell us there’s no point in going in since you can’t get out of the city. And within 2 minutes, we were through, into the door of the station, checked, through security, checked and into an eerily quiet train station but the board indicator showed all the trains running, despite one or two of them being, unusually, a couple of minutes late, they were all moving.
Almost two hours of waiting in the station and finally our train was called. We walked through with trepidation because if they wanted to do another 24-hour health code check, Ann had expired, I was still good for a few more minutes. But no problem, we were through and at 16:08, just one minute late, we were sitting on a train pulling out of Zhuzhou station and breathing a big sigh of relief.
Three hours later and a change of train in Guangzhou we were on the final leg of the journey. 40 minutes after that we got off in Zhongshan, unsure of how we would be handled, having come from a medium risk zone but no one seemed to care very much. We jostled with the masses of people attempting to scan codes, get in lines for compulsory tests on arrival and, 13 minutes later were through, tested and getting into a taxi home.
Unlike Zhuzhou, our Zhongshan tests result arrived a few hours later and now we’re back to normal; green QR codes, 24-hour test results and nothing to worry about. We now have 7 days of home isolation, meaning we can go out, we can go shopping but we should avoid restaurants, family or other gatherings, public transport and crowded places. We’re also required to go out at least three times in the next 7 days to be tested. We had the first of those three mandatory tests in the train station last night, we’ll have another today and will get another in a couple of days. Just to be safe, we’ve cancelled all arrangements or turned them into online meetings.
This was my first experience of a new “yellow-peril”, the fear of your code turning yellow is real in China but if you’re in a place where you don’t live, not only is it a fear, it’s an expensive event. We were isolated in a Marriott Hotel which is nice but we hadn’t planned on that level of expense. We were also lucky. Because I’m a foreigner and because Zhuzhou doesn’t have many foreigners, they took our case out of the normal cases and deal with Ann and I on an individual basis.
Their track and trace systems couldn’t easily accommodate me so we were walked through the different steps needed to turn us back to green by Foreign Affair Bureau’s, Mr. Li who went out of his way to communicate everything that was needed and helped us navigate the issues and, because of the hospital not being able to recognise my passport or my full name, we were walked through that system too by a most friendly and helpful nurse. Without their help and the fact that Xiao Zhang, our host/driver lived locally and was not locked down was probably the greatest piece of luck we could have found. Without him, we would not have been able to get to the hospital without a 15-kilometre round trip walk through a city under lockdown without the appropriate codes to be walking around.
And, even luckier than having a driver not locked down, a government official who was amazingly helpful and a nurse who walked us through the quagmire of hospital bureaucracy; I went through this with my wife who navigated all the systems liaised with all the officials, purchased all the food (and wine) and kept her patience despite being married to a foreigner who causes all this trouble!
An addendum to the story is this: just 36 hours after arriving home, we had been through two covid tests, one at our local train station and another, of our own volition when we walked to the local testing centre 24 hours later, we received an early morning call from our local community. They were very polite and just wanted to confirm that we had come back from Hunan and during our trip we had been in Zhuzhou, and in particular, in Tianyuan a smaller part of Zhuzhou. We confirmed we had, Tianyuan was the location of the hotel we stayed. That particular region has been designated High-Risk now and we must isolate for a total of three days, only going outside to get tests, which is exactly what we had done the day before and what we planned to do today. As I said at the beginning of this, the system is efficient and well-managed. They even knew my wife was married to a foreigner and asked if she was able to confirm the same information for me. Had they called me, I would have confirmed too but many people in local communities are reluctant to speak with foreigners, fearing they won’t understand Chinese and those people can’t speak English, or any other foreign language; they all speak Cantonese and Mandarin here.
So, this is where the story ends, with us happily at home, plenty of time to think about what went wrong, why it went wrong and to reflect on the people who helped us along the way. A dynamic Covid Zero Policy may create some headaches, it may create some inconveniences, it certainly, for us, created some stress but the bottom line is, we are safe, our local community is safe, the people we travel with are safe and China is getting on with business. The people of Zhuzhou will be ok, most of them will never come into contact with anyone who has Covid19 and throughout the world people can complain, gripe and moan about the policies but in almost 3 years since Covid emerged and living all that time in China, I’ve been able to do all my own work, earn a decent income, travel to at least 40 different cities as diverse as Beijing, Chongqing and Guangzhou, as well as many other cities in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Guangxi, Hainan and Hunan with just a minimum of disruption and, to this date, I haven’t met anyone who has had covid, nor have I met anyone who knows anyone who has had covid. A stunning statistic considering most of my family in both Australia and the UK have caught the disease, some have suffered long term as a result of it and one uncle, albeit an elderly man in his 90s, succumbed to it and died at his home in Spain.
The only time it went wrong for us in China was because we didn’t do what we were expected to do.
