When Evelyn Ma’s two-year-old daughter had a persistent high fever and severe cough earlier this month, she and her husband began to worry.

The couple decided to take their daughter to a nearby children’s hospital in the city of Jinan.

But when mom walked through the door with her daughter in her arms, chaos reigned.

“Doctors and nurses were rushing everywhere between long lines of patients waiting their turn, and people were even sitting on the floor and against the walls,” said Ma, who is 36 and works as a trade representative in China northeastern Shandong province, told Al Jazeera.

China saw a sharp increase in cases of influenza, pneumonia, RSV and cold viruses in early October, particularly among children. By the following month, the increase in the number of people seeking medical care had already put a strain on hospitals, particularly those caring for children.

“We arrived at the hospital early in the morning but couldn’t see a doctor until late afternoon, and I think it was just because my daughter’s symptoms were pretty bad and my husband and I were fussing,” Ma said said.

The rising infections and reports of undiagnosed pneumonia sparked concern that the world was on the verge of another novel pandemic outbreak spreading from China after COVID-19 first emerged as undiagnosed pneumonia in the central city of Wuhan.

But after requesting data from China, the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that this was the case no cause for alarm because the evidence suggested there was no new pathogen.

The rise in cases appeared to be more a reflection of the return of diseases that had been suppressed by the country’s ongoing pandemic lockdowns.

Ma’s daughter soon recovered, but the experience brought back disturbing memories.

“The last time I was in the hospital was at the end of December last year, and I also sat in a crowded waiting room full of coughing people,” she said.

“At that time, I was holding the hand of my grandmother, who was seriously ill with COVID,” Ma said.

Just weeks earlier, Chinese authorities had abandoned the strict COVID measures that were thereafter a pillar of the country’s so-called zero COVID policy protests in several Chinese cities against the continued enforcement of lockdowns.

For three years, the zero-COVID policy had defined – and limited – Chinese people’s interactions with each other and with the outside world in the name of fighting the pandemic.

“So many people suffered under the zero-COVID policy, and so many people died when it ended,” Ma said.

“That’s why my family and I are traumatized to this day.”

Mental health issues

Ma’s grandmother succumbed to COVID-19 in early January.

Around the same time, 29-year-old translator Lily Wang from Shenzhen also lost her grandmother to the virus.

She blames the authorities’ abrupt decision to abandon the zero-COVID policy for her death.

“If they had just warned us or given us time to prepare, maybe we could have saved them,” Wang told Al Jazeera.

After the policy’s sudden end, a wave of infections occurred across China, posing a particular danger to elderly Chinese, affecting only the elderly 40 percent had received a booster vaccination By December 2022. In the following months, more than two million more people died than in the same period in previous years, according to a study by Hong Xiao and Joseph Unger of the Public Health Sciences Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle was published in August.

While the death of Wang’s grandmother was traumatic for her entire family, the strict lockdowns of Chinese cities that became a recurring phenomenon in 2022 were personally traumatic for Wang.

Her neighborhood in the southern city of Shenzhen has repeatedly been placed under complete lockdown for months to contain flare-ups of COVID infections.

“We weren’t allowed to go outside – not even to stretch our legs, buy groceries or take out the trash,” she said.

Wang lived alone in a small apartment at the time, and food provided by authorities often arrived late at her building.

“I was hungry, lonely and trapped and started suffering from panic attacks,” she added.

As soon as the Corona regulation ended, she moved out of the apartment and returned home to her parents.

“After zero COVID, I just couldn’t stay in the apartment anymore,” she said.

“Even today I find it difficult to be alone for more than a few days.”

Ma from Jinan also had difficulty recovering mentally.

“I’m much more worried about the future than I was before 2022,” she said.

Her family’s neighborhood also experienced delayed grocery deliveries during the lockdown.

“Now I get nervous when we don’t have a lot of food left in the apartment, so I make sure we have enough meals in the freezer and fridge in case something happens,” she explained.

Hou Feng, a 31-year-old programmer from Shanghai, has also had trouble sleeping since then Strict lockdown in Shanghai which took place from April to June 2022.

“During this time, people in my building contacted the authorities to accuse each other of violating COVID rules,” Hou told Al Jazeera.

Residents of Shanghai, China’s largest city, had to undergo constant testing for COVID-19 and were required to report to one of the city’s quarantine centers if the result was positive.

Hou witnessed his screaming neighbor being dragged from her home by authorities when she refused to leave voluntarily after the test came back positive.

He still has nightmares about people in white hazmat suits breaking down his door and taking him to a quarantine facility.

“I just saw some really bad sides of China during the lockdown that I never thought I would see.”

Loud success, quiet failure

According to Hou, although the zero-COVID policy ended in failure and trauma, it was initially quite successful.

“In 2020 and 2021, fortunately we didn’t really feel the pandemic in China,” he said.

After a late response After the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Chinese authorities subsequently managed to bring the pandemic under control and normal life resumed and social order was restored in mid-2020.

This was in contrast to several high-income countries in the Western world, where Health services were struggling when the pandemic first broke out, said assistant professor Yan Long, who has studied the evolution of Chinese health policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

That also made the zero-COVID policy a source of national pride in China and an opportunity for Chinese leaders to demonstrate, at least domestically, that China had overtaken countries like the United States.

“It was a way of saying, ‘Look, democracy failed, we did it,’” Long told Al Jazeera.

However, success began to wane as more contagious COVID-19 variants such as Omicron emerged. Enormous resources were poured into constant mass testing and the introduction of lockdowns, but the measures failed to stop new outbreaks.

“The zero-COVID policy became financially untenable and scientifically impossible, while at the same time trust in the policy also began to decline dramatically,” Long said.

“By 2022, COVID was no longer the biggest fear. People were more afraid of the disruption caused by the lockdowns.”

Shanghai’s Hou agrees that the zero-COVID policy felt worse than COVID-19 towards the end.

“Politics have made life hell,” he said.

Hou knows of many people who have experienced traumatic episodes during both the lockdowns and the subsequent rapid reopening of society.

“But unlike me, most people I know don’t want to talk about the COVID times. They just want to forget about them,” he said.

Long, the academic, doubts the Chinese had any chance of healing after what happened.

“It’s been a year now and there has been no discussion about COVID, no reflection on what was right and what was wrong,” she said.

“If you bury the memory, you don’t learn lessons, which means there’s no guarantee the same mistakes won’t be made again.”