The Lingering Impact of COVID-19 in China

In Beijing, a prosperous looking 20-something woman adjusted her face mask, pushed in on the sides of it to make sure that it was flush with her skin, then took out a tissue from her purse and used it to cover her fingers while she operated an ATM machine.

This was May 2023, long after much of the rest of the world had done away with the pandemic accouterments. But in China, the COVID-19 pandemic still lives on in the hearts and minds of the Chinese people.

By all accounts, COVID-19 itself is not rampaging through the country. Unlike the swift spread of the virus that occurred in December 2022 and January 2023 after the Chinese government overturned its zero COVID policy, there are no longer high rates of the disease being reported in China today, either officially or unofficially.

So why would someone in the demographic known to have the least risk of serious illness, much less death, be not only wearing a mask but operating the keys of a cash machine as if they were Petri dishes full of the coronavirus?

I arrived at Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital Airport on April 22, five weeks after the notice went out from the Chinese Foreign Ministry that foreigners with valid visas could now re-enter the country. It was immediately clear that something was radically different from a normal ​Saturday evening on a fine spring day at the airport.

Terminal 3 was built in time to host passenger travel for the 2008 Olympic Games. According to its website, it is the second-largest passenger terminal building in the world. It boasts a floor space of approximately 986,000 meters, or 244 acres. And in years past, it needed that space. Based on my experiences flying in and out of that terminal for years, it is fair to say that on a typical day, the building would be full of people. The airport as a whole handled over 100 million passengers in 2018 and 2019.

But on April 22, 2023, the terminal was ghostlike. By all appearances, both inside and outside, few people were flying in or out of this normally bustling building. Did no one get the memo? China is open to inbound foreign travel now. So where are the travelers, whether tourists or businesspeople? China is also open to outbound passengers. Why are the check-in counters virtually empty?