Not me, thankfully.  I was fortunate to have an awesome boss who was  stuck in Vietnam during all this uncertainty and he told all the teachers to take their time and make our own decisions about when  (or if) to return to China.

For friends and colleagues at other schools, they were basically summoned back.  I found a leaked document from a competitor school that basically said all teachers had to be back before a certain date or they wouldn't get paid.  That date was March 5, and it was despite the fact that most schools had switched to online learning or were in the process of doing so.  I could just teach online in Pattaya or Siem Reap or wherever.  But not these others, they had to literally be in China and face quarantine etc... to basically do the same online teaching I was doing.

Put all this together I began to surmise that schools in Shanghai would probably resume in-person classes in late April or May, so that focused me on re-planning the rest of this bike trip.  Namely, the general plan at that point was to keep sending out applications and then do interviews while biking in Thailand.  My main sights were on the Malaysia job.  If I got it (which for some reason I had a good feeling I would), then I would change course and bike to Malaysia to leave the bike at the new school.  Then I would fly back to Shanghai in time for in-person learning and finish the current contract, and that would be that.

[Update November 2022]  Things did not go even remotely according to that plan.  Once the coronavirus became a pandemic, all countries basically closed their borders very quickly and it was a race against time to find somewhere to go.  At the time of writing, the coronavirus was already spreading around the globe, we just didn't know.  The whole assumption we got wrong was predicated on covid being confined to China and their zero-covid lockdowns doing the correct job.  For China, yes, it worked for a time.  But it was all done too late, they had to do it at the earliest date possible to save the world from covid.