Robots and cameras: China’s sci-fi quarantine watch
Robots delivering meals, ghostly figures in hazmat suits and cameras pointed at front doors: China’s methods to enforce coronavirus quarantines have appeared as if a sci-fi dystopia for legions of people.
Authorities took drastic steps to ensure that people usually do not break isolation rules after China largely tamed the virus that had paralysed the country for months.
With cases imported from abroad threatening to unravel China’s progress, travellers arriving from overseas have already been necessary to stay home or in designated hotels for two weeks.
Beijing loosened the rule in the administrative centre this week - aside from those arriving from abroad and Hubei, the province where the virus first surfaced late last year.
At one quarantine hotel in central Beijing, a guard sits at a desk on each floor to monitor all movements.
The solitude is broken by mostly of the visitors allowed near to the rooms: A three-foot-tall cylindrical robot that provides water bottles, meals and packages to hotel guests.
The robot rides the elevator and navigates hallways alone to minimise contact between guests and human staff.
When the robot finds its destination, it dials the landline phone in the area and informs the occupant within an eerie, childlike voice: “Hello, this is your service robot. Your order is here outside your room.”
Its belly opens and the guest takes the delivery items before the robot turns and rolls away.
Doctors in hazmat suits go from room to room daily reminding occupants, including an AFP journalist who had been in Hubei, to take their temperatures with the mercury thermometer provided at check-in, and also to ask if any are experiencing symptoms.
People under home quarantine elsewhere in the town experienced silent electronic alarms installed on the doors.
Officials put up a notice on each quarantined household’s door asking neighbours to monitor the confined inhabitants.
In one Beijing residential compound, officials told AFP that persons under home quarantine must inform community volunteers every time they open their doors.
Friederike Boege, a German journalist, started her second quarantine in Beijing this season on Sunday after returning from Hubei’s capital Wuhan.
Her building’s management installed a camera before her door to monitor her movements.
“It’s quite scary how you get accustomed to such things,” she told AFP.
“In addition to the camera I really do assume that the guards and the cleaner on the compound would denunciate me easily were to go out,” Boege said.
During her previous quarantine experience in March after returning from a vacation to Thailand, she was reported to building management by a cleaner for going downstairs to obtain the trash.
- No human contact -
Total isolation has become a temporary norm for all those under strict quarantine, without a good single visit to the supermarket or walk to split up the monotony.
Joy Zhong, a 25-year-old media professional time for Beijing from a work trip in the virus epicentre of Wuhan, spent three weeks without leaving a cramped room at another hotel in the Chinese capital.
There, guests were not permitted to order their own food and were instead given standardised meals.
Friends were allowed to bring packages to the front desk, that have been then left outside resort rooms by staff who avoided direct connection with guests.
“Spending 21 days in a row without seeing a single person, it felt like time was passing extremely slowly,” Zhong told AFP.
Not all people under quarantine are as closely watched as those in Beijing, however.
Charlotte Poirot, a French teacher who found its way to China in late March - right before a ban on foreigners entering the united states was introduced - spent fourteen days under quarantine at a hostel in the southeastern city Guangzhou.
She was confined alone in a 10-bunk room, with meals delivered to her door and medical personnel arriving at check her temperature multiple times a day.
“They never locked the door and the (whole) process was based on reliance,” Poirot told AFP. “Most of us played the overall game without contesting.”
Source: www.theindependentbd.com
