An ordinary day in the life of Mrs. Fan Hu: she gets up at 5:30 in the morning and cleans the house. She goes for a walk always with the mask on, taking advantage of the fact that there are almost no people on the street. Go back home. She sanitizes her hands and prepares the tea. First thing in the morning, go to the market for some vegetables and fruits. He tries to keep a certain distance from the rest of the people he comes across. upon returning, sanitize all bags, his hands again and washes well what he has bought. She doesn’t go out anymore.
Ms. Fan is 62 years old, lives in Shanghai, is divorced, and he only breaks the rigors of his daily routine four times a month, when her son goes to visit her at home and the fridge fills her up. Have you ever gone out for a walk together? But mother and son never maintain physical contact. The pandemic, for Fan, is not over yet. The woman is stuck in 2020.
His son, Lu, a lawyer who has a good position in an international law firm with an office in the financial capital of China, no longer knows what to do. “My mother does not dare to return to normal life, she cannot get rid of fear. She wants to continue living practically isolated from the world. Even from the neighborhood committee they have tried to help him, putting a social worker on him who does not open the door of the house,” says Lu.
Near the Huangpu River, which divides Shanghai in two, lives a twentysomething woman whom We are going to call Ming at the request of his psychologistwho is the one who tells us how her patient also continues to live in the bubble of the pandemic, practically locked up at home, being a social pariah.
“Even it is more confined now than before Because, like almost everyone already leads a normal life, she has become much more afraid of getting infected. She is convinced that she is going to die if she catches the Covid. has a terrifying panicthat’s why you have to go little by little with her”, explains the psychologist, Xinyu Wang, who was one of the specialists who was on the other side of the telephone assistance line that the local authorities set up last year during the long confinement of Shanghai.