Girls rollerblade in the residential compound garden in Shekou, Nanshan where American Thomas Edison Harvey lives during lockdown. Courtesy of Thomas Edison Harvey

I am living in a controlled area in Longhua. The new semester was supposed to begin Feb. 13, but it didn’t. As a foreign teacher working for Longhua Foreign Languages School, now I teach my classes through videos.

I was bored a little bit, but it didn’t bother me much, because I spent a lot of time on music, reading and researching. I made videos for my students, like what I have been doing in the past three weeks.

For me, the pros of the COVID lockdown are more because I have plenty of time for myself. For some people, doing nucleic acid tests every 72 hours does bother them.

For me, the worst part about this lockdown is that I am not able to see my kids in Canada. The last time I saw my kids was in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. They booked tickets to come to China in February 2020 and we planned to go to Thailand, but the pandemic happened and we had to cancel it. I’d love to see my kids every one or two years but now I can’t exit the country and they can’t come here to visit me. Not being able to see them, hug them and be with them is the most heartbreaking part for me.

One touching moment I had in this pandemic was in 2020. It was at the beginning of February, the head of the education bureau of Longhua visited my place with our school principal, supervisors and some other staff from the bureau. They thanked me for staying with Chinese kids and parents and brought me around 400 masks and a lot of sanitizers. That was really touching because you know there were no masks in the market at that time.

— Hamidreza Seifollahi, a Canadian ESL teacher living in Longhua

I work in Huaqiangbei, but live next to Hongshan Metro Station. Last Friday [March 4] our office building management told us the building may be locked down, so work had us take our computers and work from home, which was a small inconvenience.

The main impact COVID control measures have had on me is daily PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing.

But compared to early 2020, this has been no trouble whatsoever.

It never ceases to amaze me just how impressive the PCR testing really is. Material handling alone is a significant challenge, let alone organizing a workforce on that scale.

To date, the longest I have had to queue for a PCR test is about one hour. Well done indeed!

I am not an epidemiologist, so my opinion on COVID testing is pretty much worthless.

Mask up, get booster shots — these things are both necessary and, quite frankly, trivial to do.

— Terry Given, a New Zealander electronics engineer working in Futian and living in Longhua

A LOT of compounds have been locked-down in Shekou. It was the case for my family, during a week. We have been released yesterday [Tuesday]. Restaurants are still not allowed to welcome people. The worst thing is the online class for kids, we are doing the fifth week now. It’s very long.

— Lozach Katell from France, living in Shekou

We have so far avoided any lockdown here apart from a period of just a few hours a couple of days ago. But as for the daily life: we had been in the habit of going down to Shekou on Friday nights for entertainment, but last Friday [March 4] that was impossible owing to multiple lockdowns. It has been cleared now, but we have decided to stay away while the COVID season is with us.

There are two reasons and neither of them is fear of the virus. Having served 14 days of solitary confinement in Shanghai on my return to China, that is not an experience I want to repeat, and going out and mixing with others increases the probability that we will be tracked and traced and forced to perform quarantine at home. And if by mischance one of us actually picked up the virus, then we would be sentencing the entire population of our apartment block to the same fate.

— Walter King, a British businessman living in Shekou

I feel like Shenzhen makes us feel safe. I am currently in lockdown due to a close contact case in my area. So, we are at home till further notice.

I’ve been on online school for two months now and it does get frustrating because it is my last year of high school and none of us thought we’d be missing out on so much time with our friends and teachers once again.

Life in lockdown was not as shocking because starting January 2022, there were a surge of cases again so anti-pandemic measures were on and off in Shenzhen.

But there is a massive difficulty when it comes to deliveries at the moment. For example, we usually get mineral water delivered to our house but because of the surge of cases, we are unable to have it delivered so my family and I have to go pick those heavy water bottles from downstairs.

In terms of food, if we order food we have to go all the way down to our main gate to get it and most of the time the deliveries are very heavy.

As for normal life — when things were calm, we were able to drive to Shekou [in Nanshan District] and Luohu [District] without needing the 48-hour negative COVID test results but now we are getting tested every single day because of tightened anti-pandemic measures.

Although it gets tiring standing in lines every day, Shenzhen excels with its facility. There are COVID testing centers almost everywhere in the city. The workers at the testing sites help us with our green codes (especially foreigners because we cannot read the language).

— Diya Vinod Khemlani, an Indian high school student living in Futian.The community she lives in was lifted from lockdown last week.