Thanks. Similarly if you search flights to mainland china, some search engines will show you to transit via Hongkong, Taiwan or Macau, non of these are possible.

Can't find any more details on this but the source is reliable https://www.caixinglobal.com/2022-04...101869212.html

It looks like it was originally reported on the Chinese version of the site (Caixin.com) but has since been deleted...

WSJ article: https://cn.wsj.com/articles/%E4%B8%8...B4-11649894106

Relevant translated portion:

12 years and already bought into the Chinese government's propaganda. Though lots of Chinese who have lived there their whole life are starting to think otherwise.

I guess you can only laugh at it, but someone beat up a volunteer who came to do the COVID test cause his wife complained it hurt. And the response of the government? 5,000 RMB fine.
Some lady was making a fuss about the quarantine, wanting to bang pots and make noise. She gets punished with a week in jail.

So does the government care about people? Well, in China you can get beat up and nothing happens to the criminal.

Oh, and what about how women are treated? I guess China treats women well. I think most Chinese realize women have minimal rights in China.

I think China did a great job the past few years, keeping deaths minimal compared to the US. However, times have changed, as they always do.
The presumption is that they care for their people. But the reality is that they are hurting people economically and not doing anything about it. The US actually had a moratorium on evictions. China has no such thing.
When you say COVID Zero at all costs, do you mean making it so people are stuck outside and cannot return home? Stuck in their car for the quarantine period?

The costs are rising, the benefits are decreasing (cause omicron is a new game).

But as to living in China, I always thought it was a tradeoff between safety (as in physical safety on the streets) but there is a concept of "safety" in the sense of being able to plan for the future. You cannot do that in a warzone-there is no point making any longer than short-term plans cause you don't know what will happen tomorrow. With China's COVID policies you absolutely cannot plan.
And their policies also make it glaringly obvious "guanxi" still exists (as in Shanghai people are found to be COVID positive in other provinces. I thought there was a lockdown?).

Up to the point where the vaccines were released, the PRC's response was the correct one. Well, other than the first few weeks of the outbreak. Did you forget about Dr. Li? But then they've made one blunder after another, while Australia and New Zealand have had the proper approach both before and after the vaccines became available.

One of my friends in SH caught SARS-CoV-2, after she had been in isolation along with the rest of her building for nearly a month. She has no idea where she got it from, although my guess is probably micro droplets somewhere in a common area of her building. No one else has tested positive, so either people are hiding cases (and they've given people plenty of motivation to lie about positive home tests or keep quiet about symptoms) or it was a visitor. She is perfectly willing to be vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna but was unvaccinated because of the idiots in the government who still haven't approved it. Looks like she's going to escape with just minor symptoms. And then her father, who is over 75 and also unvaccinated, and whom she hasn't seen for over a month, caught SARS-CoV-2 as well. The way things are looking right now, he's also going to escape with just minor symptoms. But how many people are going to die because they haven't approved Pfizer and Moderna and a lot of the locals don't want anything to do with the "inferior" local vaccines?

I realize that this is a small sample size, but that's now two people I know who likely caught BA.2 in the last week and have no idea where it came from. I really have to wonder what the case undercount is, and wouldn't be surprised if there are now millions of unreported cases in Shanghai alone.

If the goal is protecting people, then they should have approved the best tool that exists to protect people. They still haven't.

For a time now gone by, you were not thinking wrong. And I expect for a time in the future a few years from now, you are not wrong. But you are not right in your thinking for last year and this year. All in all, not too bad!

Thank you!

Reported that CDC is suspending its (stupid) covid test requirement to return to the US

https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn...very-document/

This only applies to Shanghai (not the rest of China, or the rest of the world).
Also tests may be required to get to the airport in the first place.

Yes, which is ironic cause the reason Shanghai is locked down is because of a COVID surge and purportedly the reason for the testing requirement.
I would put the CDC incompetence on the same level as China's central government.

ummm…not really getting your concern.

the people in shanghai have been going thru continual testing for weeks now…if they tested +, they arent exactly going to be allowed to go catch a flight….

First of all, given the incompetence in China's central government, the US central government should not be trusting China's central government, and second, you can test negative and still be infected. CDC should either be testing people who didn't show a negative test before departure on arrival and holding them in a quarantine facility on arrival, or they should do away with the testing requirement entirely. It's perfectly OK for the CDC to change policies based on new data it receives but it makes no sense to have two contradictory policies in effect simultaneously.

This is evacuating our citizens from a bad situation. And the risk from those people is almost certainly less than the average risk in America.

The risk from most places is less than the average risk in America. The policy never made sense in the first place. But the CDC is just run by idiots.
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They are doing a favor to those of us trying to get food in Shanghai. It’s a humanitarian gesture that the state department asked the CDC to allow.

I don’t think it’s idiotic at all and I think every country that has these entry requirements should wave them for their citizens trying to escape the madness that is shanghai.