Families tell of sending elderly relatives away from China’s cities amid reports of surging cases and deaths.
Three days ago, Lily Wang tested positive for COVID-19.
Isolating in her small apartment in Shenzhen, the 29-year-old is currently fighting a high fever and a sore throat.
Despite her own illness, Wang’s thoughts were for her grandmother who has been spared from sickness so far, thanks to the quick actions of her parents.
“My parents got my grandmother out of the city in time,” Wang said over the phone between bouts of coughing.
Two days after dropping her grandmother off with relatives in the countryside, both of Wang’s parents fell sick.
Almost all of Wang’s work colleagues are stricken by COVID too, she adds.
Across China, those who can afford it are getting their elderly relatives out of the major cities to protect them from succumbing to the wave of COVID-19 that is currently battering the country.
“The COVID situation is really bad right now,” 24-year-old Shuwen Lu told Al Jazeera over a WeChat connection from her home in Beijing.
Lu, who is also currently fighting a COVID infection, told how her grandparents were helped out of Beijing to a small village where the family has a house.
“Had they stayed in the city, they might soon have joined the countless elderly people that are dying right now,” Lu said.
Since authorities began lifting China’s strict COVID restrictions in early December, numerous reports have emerged of people falling sick with the virus, hospitals overwhelmed with patients, and the country’s crematoriums struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies arriving at their doors.
It was stories similar to these that prompted the sources who spoke to Al Jazeera to move their older relatives out of built-up areas.
“My family decided that the safest thing to do for my grandparents was to get them out of Beijing so they can ride out the COVID storm in safety away from the crowds,” Lu explained.
In the cities of Fuzhou and Shanghai, sources there also told Al Jazeera of senior family members making for the countryside or smaller village communities to escape the wave of COVID that has emerged since China dropped its zero-COVID policy.
Aljazeera
