Pretty much, I'm still not sure if they necessarily did anything incorrectly with regards to monitoring cases and contact tracing and all that. They had a runaway increase in infections and decided to do Dec 2019/Jan 2020 Wuhan-style lockdowns in Shanghai basically. I never got much detail about if the building where my family lived was physically blocked off at the entrance but I saw plenty of images of that on WeChat. There was also a lot of weird videos around that time, I remember my partner showing me a video of some naked woman climbing around on electrical wiring and shit while people in their apartments were yelling at her.

Shanghai is pretty walkable for the most part, though it's becoming a bit car infested and individualistic (kind of fulfilling the joke that it's PRC's NYC). So it's pretty hard on people to get literally locked up in their buildings. Even in NYC, the most that happened were suspending large public gatherings, no eating indoors, masks, etc but people could still walk around and leave the city pretty easily. Which is why infections and deaths kept shooting up, but that was pre-Omicron, pre-vaccine, pre-everybody getting infected with Omicron and developing some neoplasm antibodies because the vaccines target an old protein that's mutated. I feel like China really dodged the bullet on the deadly strains like Alpha and Delta and won the opportunity to be less cautious with Omicron without much risk, but they're still playing it incredibly safe.

I feel like Shanghai could've figured out how to administrate some time for people to get out and about considering they did in the last few weeks of the lockdowns. If they do any mass lockdowns again, I really hope they figure out how to facilitate that, just for the mental health of everyone there.