If you were to walk me down the streets of Shanghai right now, what would it be like?

It sounds like you have friends there.

I have quite a few friends there.

Date Kang reports on China for the Associated Press.

I think if you walk down the streets of Shanghai, it would be very quiet.

For most of the pandemic, you know, some people from Shanghai kind of had this attitude of,

oh, you know, look at the rest of China.

They have such crude COVID controls, but we don't have to deal with that kind of stuff.

Huh. Not anymore of stuff. Huh.

Not anymore.

Obviously.

Not anymore, Dake says, because for the last month, Shanghai has been in varying degrees of

coronavirus lockdown as COVID surged.

The authorities say those lockdowns are getting lifted now.

But even so...

In theory, the Shanghai government might let you out in your compound,

or you might even be allowed out on the streets and go shopping

or out for walks in kind of a limited fashion.

But in practice, people I talk to in that last category, who in theory are supposed to be able to go out, aren't really being allowed to go out.

What happens when they try? Yeah, their local neighborhood committees are often paranoid.

Their number one priority is keep COVID cases to

zero. And the people who are testing positive, they get sent to citywide quarantine centers

...