Shenzhen traffic police officers check a Shenzhen-inbound vehicle at Baguang Tollgate on Huishen Riverside Expressway in Longgang midnight Sunday. Xie Shusen
Traffic police officer Yang Jing arrived at an inspection point set up at Baguang Tollgate on Huishen Riverside Expressway in Longgang District with six police aides before midnight Sunday when the mercury plummeted by at least 10 degrees Celsius as a cold front swept through the city.
They would check every single vehicle passing through the tollgate to Shenzhen in the next eight hours until 8 a.m.
The Baguang Tollgate inspection point is one of the 48 inspection points across the city that function around the clock during the COVID-19 prevention and control period. The city’s traffic police officers work in three eight-hour shifts at the inspection points.
At the Baguang Tollgate inspection point, Yang was responsible for the overall management and coordination between his team and the tollgate staff. The six police aides would rotate every hour to guide arriving vehicles to one of the three lanes where staff would verify vehicle information declared online in advance and conduct passenger body temperature checks.
Yang closed the lane after being told by a tollgate staffer that the data acquisition equipment at his lane had malfunctioned. He then rearranged traffic cones so as to guide vehicles to another lane for checks.
Not far from the inspection point is a resting room converted from a shipping container and furnished with the basics where Yang and his coworkers can refuel and rest.
At the Fudigang inspection point at Xinyu Tollgate, which borders Huizhou City, 36-year-old Lin Hao was busy checking the driving records of each passing vehicle. With three special smartphones on tripods, Lin and his night-shift coworkers were able to tell if a vehicle had been through areas hit hard by the virus before allowing the vehicle to continue onto information verification and temperature checks.
“There are many vehicles, especially trucks from Huizhou and Jiangxi Province, passing through even during the wee hours in recent days,” Lin told a reporter with the DTNews who visited the inspection point at about 3 a.m. when it was only 7.8 degrees Celsius.
According to Lin, sleepiness, cold and hunger are the three main difficulties they have to overcome on the night shift at the inspection point, “especially from 2 to 5 a.m.,” he said. “Even when there are few vehicles passing through, we have to keep walking around to stay warm. It would be easy for us to catch a cold if we took a nap.”
There are three chairs and two tables in the shabby container-turned-resting room at Lin’s inspection point. Leaflets with anti-COVID-19 information are stacked on the table with some bottled water and crackers.
Although bare, the resting room shelters Lin and his colleagues from rain and cold wind. They had only a tent before the container resting room was ready, said Lin, who has worked as a police officer for 15 years. Lin’s wife is also a police officer, and the couple has two children. Lin said his parents are taking care of his younger child in Lin’s hometown, and his wife takes the elder child with her to work every day as the couple have been busy with the city’s virus containment efforts.
As temperatures fell to as low as 7 degrees Sunday night, Luohu District opened disinfected shelters for the homeless, DTNews said. Subdistrict office staff reached out to the homeless, checking their temperatures before taking them into the shelters where food, face masks and warm clothing were provided.