The streets of Shanghai were eerily quiet at 6pm which is normally the peak of the rush hour.  You could hear the birds chirping.  I went for a short walk and barely got about 300 meters from the compound.  Across the main street, I saw my usual Family Mart blocked off in blue police tape.  That entire mini-block had been sealed off covering stores, small compound doors, and anything else.  Presumably a close contact of a confirmed Omicron case had visited the Family Mart.  

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The policy is that China screens both close contacts and second degree contacts. In recent days with so many of these cases popping up, the authorities decided to change tack and do rotating 48 hour lockdowns of all the compounds and office buildings in 'key areas'.  This became known as grid screening.    Where these are is anyone's guess, but looking at the data you can try to figure out the general areas.

So far we've escaped the dragnet, but it's only a matter of time.  This is about as close as we've come to a full scale citywide lockdown so far.  Practically speaking it's a lockdown without saying it's a lockdown.  Everyone is lining up to get covid tests voluntarily.  The whole thing is like playing survivor, to see who will be the last man standing.  For the record, we're still standing.

Later on I went for a coffee only to find all the shops had packed up for the night at 7pm.  What few remaining Starbucks were open had the entire store cordoned off and you could only do takeout.  So takeout it was.  Then I picked up my wife from her group fitness class.   This class was still happening, amazingly enough.  She told me the gym would soon close indefinitely.

We went for takeout food obviously and then to stock up at the grocery store for the inevitable compound lockdown.  Not surprisingly, the entire neighborhood had the exact same idea and the store was absolutely slam  packed.  Thankfully the shelves were still stocked aplenty, in start contrast to many other supermarkets in the city that had been stripped bare already.

And then the next day there was no compound lockdown.