Covid-19: Chinese woman stuck in lockdown with blind date
By Kerry Allen
BBC Monitoring
A swift Covid-19 lockdown in China has reportedly led to a woman getting stuck at the house of a man she met on a blind date.
A woman, only identified as Ms Wang, posted on Chinese social media platform WeChat last week that she had got locked down with her date after visiting his house for a meal.
In the post, she said that she had recently returned to the city of Zhengzhou from Guangzhou ahead of the Lunar New Year.
"I'm getting quite old, so my parents arranged more than 10 blind dates for me," she said in this post. She wrote that her fifth date had said "he was good at cooking, and invited me to his house so he could cook a meal".
However, during the meal, she discovered that her date's community had gone into swift lockdown due to cases of Covid-19, and ended up being unable to leave his house for several days.
Ms Wang told media on Sunday that she had been stuck for four days at her date's house, and that the situation was "not ideal".
However, she said that her date had cooked every day for her while they were stranded together.
She added though that "he doesn't speak much".
It is unclear whether she still remains stuck at her date's house. However, cases of Covid-19 have persisted in Zhengzhou in recent days.
There have been more than 100 cases of Covid-19 in Zhengzhou over the past week, the Global Times newspaper reports.
Non-essential businesses were ordered to close on Tuesday in the city, and there have been large-scale Covid-19 testing drives rolled out to test the city's 12.6 million residents for any "silent" Covid-19 carriers.
China has a zero Covid-19 policy, meaning that swift lockdowns are routinely imposed in communities when cases of the virus are detected.
Ms Wang is not the only person in recent weeks who has found herself caught unawares amid lockdown measures being swiftly enforced.
Last month, a man found himself locked down in the middle of a house move in the northern city of Xi'an.
He told media he hadn't even been allowed to finish collecting luggage from his car, and so had had to ask neighbours if he could borrow a duvet.