But offscreen, China’s virus war is grim. Silent cities sit in a white winter smog that blots out the sky, their silent, empty streets contrasting with the crowded hospitals where doctors and nurses break down because they lack equipment or rooms for the patients squeezed outside their doors.
Fear lurks in the background of even healthy people’s minds, inflated by the proximity of death, fragility of loved ones, and most of all by the unknown: where the virus comes from, how it changes, how it spreads, whether one has it or not, and whether authorities are providing the full truth. It is a country of fretful eyes peering out over surgical masks.
