So China's Covid controls have caught up with me once again, but this time the results are not as disrupting to my life: on Wednesday I got an SMS warning me that I'd been flagged as having been somewhere "with pandemic-related risk". Just like most people in China I am both.../1

completely fed up with this stuff, and also at some level quite used to it. I groaned inwardly, but didn't panic. I went about my day, knowing that at some point I would get a follow-up phone call. I missed a call a few hours later which was probably related. /2

Then the following morning I got a call from someone in the Sanlitun 街道 ("subdistrict", one of China's smallest administrative divisions). They asked me if I'd been to 北京坊, the shopping area just south of Tiananmen pictured below, on Saturday. /3

I realised that on Saturday I had indeed eaten in a restaurant within 北京坊 with some friends. Even though the shopping complex is open-air, you still had to scan a QR code to enter the area. There was no use in denying it, so I said I might indeed have been there. /4

To my great relief, I was told I would just have to do three days of "health monitoring". This means getting tested for three consecutive days. I was also added to a WeChat group, where I have to report my temperature twice a day and post a picture of my test results. /5

I didn't get the dreaded pop-up in my health app, meaning I'm free to roam. On Thursday I also got a second call from someone asking if I'd been somewhere in Sanlitun, a place whose name I didn't recognise. I said I wasn't sure, and they said "anyway, just make sure you do... /6

two tests over the next three days" and hung up. It seems a lot of places in central Beijing have been visited by one or more people who later tested positive over the last week or so. What surprised me was the generally lax attitude towards me. /7

Of course, dozens of thousands of people must have passed through 北京坊 on Saturday, and all the other places now declared high-risk. Quarantining everyone in their homes would be a huge task. They might as well just lock down the whole of central Beijing, but it seems... /8

..they don't want to go that way for now. Instead they're just telling everyone to get tested every day, and maybe also report their temperature in a WeChat group. I don't get the feeling anyone is even really checking that I report my temperature, by the way. It's all very... /9

..perfunctory, and everyone's fed up. Still, I hope this somewhat laxer approach works, because if cases start spiralling out of control I'm sure they'll still crackdown hard. Also, even if Beijing really has found a way of being slightly less draconian in its measures, .../10

in most of China the response is still far more extreme, with whole districts or counties getting locked down over a single case. In any case, none of this means the Zero Covid policy is winding down. On the contrary, the system is just being perfected.