A Shanghai-based recruiter, who asked not to be named for security reasons, said he felt “hopeless” when he learned of the death of an industry colleague’s mother, who reportedly had skin cancer and was denied treatment because she had Covid. Although he did not know the woman personally, the recruiter decided not to let her death go unnoticed. On Reddit, he discovered a shared Google Sheet that, like the Airtable database, kept a record of the deceased.
The recruiter added details he knew about the woman to the fact-checking spreadsheet. Volunteers working on the paper are required to list their sources, and each link is archived by the Wayback Machine in case the publication disappears. The shared document has stricter sourcing rules and fewer records than the Airtable database – just 60 cases – and was last updated in early May.
The recruiter says he has no idea who created the document or who he worked with, but it makes him feel safer. “I’d be a little scared if we were talking to each other in private,” he says, adding that he’s still haunted by the experience of being reprimanded at school for speaking out on Twitter against an influential staff member.
This is almost impossible to understand the extent of the suffering caused by the recent Shanghai blockade. But Daohouer, a volunteer-run aid network set up to help people access food, treatment and medicine during the lockdown, hinted at the level of desperation. The site worked by encouraging residents in urgent need of supplies or health care to leave a message, with volunteers then contacting them to help. A visualization of the requests submitted online shows that over half of the requests are related to medical accessibility.
The page maintains a record of 1,297 requests in Shanghai involving seriously ill people since April 11, when the data became available. The number of such requests peaked in mid-April, when the site reported a spike in messages from people seeking help accessing medical care.
The cases from Daohouer were visualized by two Chinese people living in Canada who are part of a technology collective called O3O. The two plan to back up the data submitted to the platform in case it somehow gets cleared of censorship. “The older generation has a habit of hoarding food,” said one of O3O’s co-founders, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But the younger generation has a habit of taking screenshots of anything that might be considered sensitive.” The duo also runs a website called Our Pandemic Memory, which invites people to record stories of their lives in confinement. The site, preventing possible censorship in China, automatically submits each story to the Wayback Machine.
Despite efforts to record deaths in the city, the Shanghai-based recruiter remains skeptical that the government will launch an official investigation into the number of people reported to have died as a result of the recent lockdown. No similar efforts have been announced following similar city-wide lockdowns in cities such as Xi’an, where deaths related to difficulties accessing health care have also been reported.
Still, the recruiter hopes projects to remember and record the dead could one day help people learn what life and death were really like in Shanghai during the harshest of lockdowns. “Perhaps one day in the future, when we can discuss the epidemic and learn lessons, these materials will be used for reference.”
