Coronavirus: British mother lifts lid on China’s lockdown, from forced quarantine for the healthy to daily temperature checks

Western countries may now face same severe restrictions if they want to beat Covid-19, Sally Spika warns Colin Drury

Sally and Ralf Spika in forced issolation in Wuxi, China (Sally Spika)

It was when government officials dressed in hazmat suits turned up at her door and demanded to take her temperature that Sally Spika truly realised the all-encompassing scope of China’s battle against coronavirus.

The 56-year-old Brit has been living in the eastern city of Wuxi since 2009 where she runs a restaurant with husband Ralf.

As the 3.5-million-person metropolis was shut down from January, the couple, along with 25-year-old daughter Savanna, watched on, astonished, as perhaps the largest containment exercise in human history was implemented around them.

Road blocks were put up to prevent travel and the entire population was ordered to register on a mobile app monitoring their movements. State security guards, armed with infrared guns, appeared at the doors of every shop, pharmacy and apartment block, taking the temperature of anyone entering. Reports emerged that thousands of people – many of them perfectly healthy – were being taken into forced quarantine for at least two weeks because they had happened to share air space with someone later diagnosed with Covid-19.

But it was when the Spika family received a knock on their flat door that the extent of the measures really hit home.

“Officials now arrive periodically,” says the resterauteur today. “Just asking, ‘How many people are in the apartment?’ Show us your ID? Where have you travelled to?’ And then they take your temperatures. The first time it happened I freaked out. It was disturbing…I get the necessity but, for a few moments, it does feel like your immediate future depends on these strange men in your home.”

Now, as China begins to ease restrictions – with the country cautiously claiming to have beaten the virus – Ms Spika has laid bare what life behind the lockdown has been like.

And, she says, if it sounds like something from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, “that’s because it is”.

“Your existence becomes so fragile that it is literally pulled under you from one day to the next,” she tells The Independent over Skype from her apartment some 700km east of Wuhan where the virus was first detected. “That is terrifying.”

Among measures, she details, were home windows being hermetically sealed shut on government orders, pharmacies prevented from selling medicine for fear the sick were trying to hide their illness and officials ordering anyone even mildly exposed to the virus into specially requisitioned ‘isolation hotels’.

“I had a Canadian friend who came back here via Moscow and the next day, he was at home with his girlfriend, there was a knock at his door,” says Ms Spika, who is originally from Cheshire. “And they just took him into quarantine because someone on the flight had tested positive. He was hauled off on a bus there and then. It’s not quite as grim as it sounds, because they took over hotels, so it’s reasonable accommodation, but…it’s not pleasant.”

At no point, she says, was the population told how long the shut down would last. Indeed, initially in January, the one-party state’s government told citizens simply that the Chinese new year holiday was to be extended for a few days.

“But then it kept getting extended,” she recalls. “Perhaps it was better they did it that way. If they’d said it would be more than two months, I’m not sure I could have coped.”

She, Ralf and Savanna have not been banned from going outside. “But there is nowhere to go, nowhere open, no-one else about”.

All social gatherings, including dinner parties, were banned; and citizens ordered to register on a location-tracking app. Based on details each person input into the system, they were given a colour-coded health ranking. Green meant you were considered virus-free. Those who got red – probably because their movements suggested they had spent time near someone with the infection – could expect a knock on the door.

How have they survived in such a surreal new situation? “It’s terrifying how fast you adapt,” says Ms Spika. “A lot of reading, watching boxsets, thinking. Ralf is a Michelin starred chef so we’ve been doing a lot of cooking. I suppose I’m lucky in that way.”

For Savanna, the situation was perhaps even harder. She lives in the UK and had only been visiting her parents for the Christmas holidays when she found herself having to stay put because of the shut down. “She’s sure it’s a ruse we have invented to extend her stay with us,” says Ms Spika.

The family’s account, of course, is not the first to emerge from China but it does add to a growing body of evidence illustrating the sheer extent – and brutality – of the lockdown.

In one story, revealed by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, a disabled boy reportedly died after he was left without food and water when his family were forcibly quarantined in Wuhan. In another in the Global Times, a state-owned newspaper, it was said that drones were being used to threaten people with punishment for not wearing compulsory face masks. And, in Shanghai, guests at hotels have reported having to submit to their temperatures being taken every night during their stay.

Yet, if the measures seem Draconian – even the World Health Organisation called them “aggressive” – the fact that they increasingly appear to suppressed the virus has led to questions about f such measures should be deployed in Europe.

“I don’t think the UK is that far behind in terms of restrictions,” says Ms Spika.

The UK, in particular, she reckons could soon face a choice: accept a far longer period of limitations on personal liberties or be overwhelmed by the virus. She has pondered this a lot – “because we’ve had a lot of time to think,” she deadpans.

“What I realised, just trying to make sense of it, is if you haven’t really understood what China has done to stop this virus, you could think they just closed Starbucks and everything was okay – and it wasn’t okay. It took a lot more than that,” she said. “[In the UK], you’re adults, you live in a democracy but there’s a certain amount of responsibility that go along with maintaining that – so now you have that choice.”

In particular, she says, China’s ability to contact trace after it started recording everyone’s movements was vital in getting to grips with the infection.

“Contrast that Nadine Dorries, a health minister, who tested positive and then appealed on Facebook because she couldn’t remember with who she had met,” says Ms Spika. “It’s a question Western cultures will face – is surrendering privacy worth it to save lives?”

Wuxi, China (Getty Images)

For China, itself, light is now seems to be appearing at the end of the tunnel – yet life remains a long way from getting back to normal. More than 3,200 people have died from the disease, with over 81,000 cases – both figures overtaken only recently by Italy and the US.

Officials may have been ordered to restore production and some transport routes opened but schools are still closed and, in vast swathes of the country, non-essential businesses remain in limbo. Wuhan, the epicentre, will stay in complete lockdown until 8 April.

As for Ms Spika, she and Ralf, who is originally from Germany, have been told they can apply to reopen their restaurant, Uberfood, as of next week.

They have been living off their savings for the past two months and desperately need the money, she says.

But they also wonder how quickly the restaurant trade can recover. Tables will have to be kept a metre apart, customers will be ordered to wear masks when eating and it will be near impossible to source all the restaurant’s international ingredients with flights remaining hugely limited.

“In that context, will people be too nervous to come out and eat?” asks Ms Spika. “Everything is now so uncertain. Even if the virus is beaten, it feels like the battle is only just starting.”