Photos of positive tests, health tips or a detailed symptom diary: On social media in China, no one is now ashamed to say they have Covid-19, as the country finally learns to live with the virus.
For a long time, catching the coronavirus was synonymous with taboo in the country.
Even fully recovered patients found themselves socially isolated and discriminated against in their job searches, because then the strict “zero Covid” policy reigned, in force for almost three years.
But authorities made an abrupt about-face last week, lifting most health restrictions, including near-mandatory PCR testing several times a week and placing all positive cases in quarantine centers.
Immediately, a wave of cases swept over the country, and being Covid positive has now become commonplace… and assumed.
“On the third day of my return to the office, I am positive,” said a Beijing resident on Xiaohongshu, the Chinese version of Instagram, posting a photo of her antigen test marked with two red bars.
“Now I have a fever,” wrote another netizen, while similar posts on social media have numbered in the thousands for a week.
Also on Xiaohongshu, the Beijing influencer “Mm”, known for sharing her luxury purchases or her outfits of the day online, did not hesitate to let her subscribers know that she too had the Covid.
“It’s not really scary, you just have to adapt to it and drink more water,” she advised them, listing all her symptoms in detail, along with a photo of a bouquet of roses.
Recipes for homemade treatments, with dubious scientific effectiveness, have also gone viral.
One recommends steamed oranges with salt to soothe a sore throat.
Another swears by canned yellow peaches – a traditional treatment for sick Chinese children – prompting state media to warn people against this kind of grandmother’s recipe for the virus.
Celebrities and public figures have also gone public with their contagion, such as real estate tycoon Wang Shi, who told his 22 million followers last week that he was “an asymptomatic case”.
On the internet, memes about the flood of cases have multiplied.
“Before: buy vegetables and prepare to be confined. Now: buy medicine and prepare to have a fever,” says a post shared hundreds of times on Weibo, China’s Twitter.
The change in tone online reflects new rhetoric displayed in recent days by authorities and state media, which now assure the virus is harmless, after claiming the opposite for almost three years.
But China remains ill-prepared to face a sharp rise in Covid cases, while millions of elderly people are still not fully vaccinated, facing a highly contagious Omicron variant.
Sharing her experience as a Covid patient is therefore not without risk: when, this week, the Chinese reporter Lv Ziyuan published a video showing her being treated in a hospital, when she had only mild symptoms, Internet users cried foul, judging that she was abusing the meager resources of the health system.
The sentence “Lv Ziyuan should abandon his hospital bed” quickly went viral on Weibo, before being censored.