China’s Covid-Testing Strategy Comes Under Strain

For people like Haily Zhao, who gets swabbed every 72 hours as required by the authorities in Beijing, testing cuts into the time she needs to decompress after work. “It’s not, ‘I can do whatever I want as long as I’m doing P.C.R. testing,’” said Ms. Zhao, 26. “It’s, ‘Whatever I’m doing or want to do, I have to do a P.C.R. test first.’”

When one conference recently used the tagline “The age of P.C.R. prosperity” in its marketing material, the backlash was so swift that the organizers had to cancel the event and later clarified it was not meant to promote P.C.R. testing. “Some people are rubbing salt in the wounds of those who are suffering,” one commenter wrote of the conference online.

Even some of the workers who swab throats and noses and process test results have lost enthusiasm for the country’s testing protocols. Before China’s mass testing mandate, there were 153,000 people employed as testers and hundreds of thousands of Communist Party member volunteers ready to help fight the coronavirus.

But the job is tiring and pays little. While a lab technician can make as much as $4,250 a month, advertisements for swabbing jobs offer something closer to $1,000.

“It’s a boring, tedious, repetitive, mechanical job,” said Hu Shixin, a college student in the eastern city of Nanjing. Mr. Hu volunteered for two weeks in August to help with testing in the industrial city of Taiyuan as part of a youth Communist Party program. Dressed in a sweaty protective suit, he scanned ID cards and handed out the P.C.R. testing tubes.

Other community and medical workers sometimes cut corners and pretended to test people without taking samples, Mr. Hu said. “Maybe they don’t think that doing the P.C.R. test is so necessary,” he added. “For them, doing P.C.R. testing is just a job.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/business/china-covid-testing.html