Saturday rumblings

It's Friday night when the rumors start to come in. New covid-19 infections in Beijing. An outbreak at a market. We continue with our movie night pizza party. No Country for Old Men.

The next morning the rumors of infections are reported as news. Eight confirmed cases. Market shutdown. 10,000 to be tested. By the afternoon the infected count was 46.  The market, which is massive and supplies other markets in Beijing, was shut down causing vegetable shortages across town for the day. Later in the day on Saturday schools and workplaces began checking if anyone had been to the market. Reports on twitter of community volunteers going door to door checking if anyone went to the market.

The source of the infection was supposedly and a cutting board from imported salmon. This seems pretty unlikely to me. Nevertheless salmon is pulled from store shelves. Aidan naturally orders salmon sushi delivery for lunch. Forty minutes later umami sushi arrives, the restaurant having swapped out the salmon.

Late afternoon, I head out to meet a friend. We've done a three pub crawl three of the past four weeks. The first stop was to get a lager on tap at a place we went to two weeks ago. No lager. My friend was upset and walked out. Thought about other options and then decided go back inside. That's when we noticed the pub had a new name, new menu, apparently new ownership. So we stayed and had a cold canned Asahi. The focus on the night however was our second stop, a relatively new place that had a signature burger that looked really good, fried cheese on top and all. We peddled over there. Once inside we had to provide contact tracing information. Name, phone number, id number, current temperature.  We also had to show our health status via a city provided wechat miniapp. All of this is pretty common when entering a public place these days. My friend would not provide his id number or use the miniapp. The pub thought he didn't have the miniapp so started to tell him all he had to do was scan a QR code to get it. This annoyed him and he threatened to leave. They said it was policy. So he left. So I left. I told him lots of places are asking people to show their health status via the miniapp. He said they won't get his business. I told him I was done for the night. I have enough stress during the week. This needs to be a destress thing. I peddled home and watched an episode of Catastrophe while having leftovers.

As I write this, on Sunday afternoon, a community volunteer knocked on apartment door and asked if anyone had been to the market. It could be an interesting week.