Comment by namelosw
5 years ago
Beijing authorities require companies to extends for a week unless the company is either critical industries or can fully work-from-home. My company started to fully work-from-home from today, for at least 2 weeks.
This experiment is massive, industries usually move forward only when it's mandatory. I believe this is a great chance that would make people see a lot of professions could be handled quite well remotely, and face-to-face is not that mandatory.
Also, some off-topic info/experiences in case anyone wonders - yesterday I was back from San Francisco to Beijing, here's what I saw:
1. Almost every Chinese I saw during the trip wares a mask. In SFO airport, during the flight, Beijing airport, and on the street. Not many people wear gloves. One guy even wears goggles. I wore an N95 mask and vinyl gloves (couldn't find surgical gloves, and masks are sold out for a lot of pharmacies) for the whole trip (like 15 hours), not the most pleasant experience but acceptable.
2. I filled in two additional forms on the flight which asked if I have been to Hubei (the province which Wuhan located in). One from the custom authority and one from Beijing authority, but the forms are almost identical.
3. When I tried to take a lift, I found Didi (Uber/Lyft counterpart) requires every driver and passenger to wear a mask or everyone has the right to reject and report others if they don't. I guess would I have to take the metro if I didn't buy a mask in the US, but I'm also not sure if the metro staff would let me in if that was the case. Simply put, there are tons of public places that reject people that don't wear masks, it seems to be a very hard time for people who are unfortunately couldn't buy/afford overpriced masks.
4. There are people on the street, but very few. It was the last day of the holiday, in prior years it should be crowded already because people migrate back from every province to Beijing.
5. When I back to my apartment, I found almost every apartment would have security guards stop visitors from entering the apartment, for those who live here requires to show a paper from the apartment to enter freely. Rumor says there are even apartments lockdown themselves that people cannot go out, I'm not sure if it's true.
6. Although Beijing is always easy to buy everything online, food delivery choices only have very few options left for now. Not sure if it would back to normal after the holiday ends. Other than food and medical supplies, things haven't changed much. And also delivery guys cannot enter the apartment, so people have to go outside the apartment to get the delivery.
7. For the rest of the week, I'm going to live on instant noodles and some simple foods. Wish me good luck =)
Thanks for sharing, good luck.
What are cultural outlets that the Chinese use to deal with this type of suffering/anxiety/sadness?
There aren't many. Traditionally, Chinese people would rather endure. There are a lot of families play mahjong all day long, but it's unfortunate for those who don't have 4 players in the family - most of the public places to play mahjong have been shutdown.
For young people, their interests are more westernized, varies from person to person so that depends. It's more introverted people favored when people cannot go outside.
Luckily, the Internet plays a centric role in people's daily life, at least in cities and towns.
For the countryside, villages lockdown themselves by rejecting strangers and far relatives, but villagers can still move around.