It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of — an awkward blind date that simply won’t end.
For one Chinese woman, that became a reality last Friday when she said she had to stay in her date’s apartment after authorities imposed a Covid-19 lockdown on that area of the city of Zhengzhou.
Officials were responding to an outbreak of the delta variant in the capital of Henan province where scores of cases were recorded last week.
Three days later, the woman shared videos of her lockdown routine on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, and Douyin, which TikTok is known as in the country. Her story quickly went viral.
In one of the videos viewed by NBC News, the woman said she had traveled from the city of Guangzhou to Zhengzhou, where her family had set up a series of blind dates for her.
“I am getting older, my family introduced me to more than 10 blind dates,” she said. Her new lockdown partner was her fifth date in the lineup, she added.
Although she did not reveal her full name, age or the identity of her blind date, she was identified as Wang in subsequent interviews with local media. Her handle on Douyin is “Wang Yi in Guangzhou.”
Wang agreed to meet at the blind date’s house Friday so he could “show off his cooking,” she told The Paper, a Shanghai-based digital newspaper, on Monday.
While her host had been a gracious one, she said, he barely spoke but “everything else is great.” She added that he “cooks, cleans up, works.”
While she was grateful to “everyone for your concern, I will hang in there,” she said. “I hope the pandemic will soon be over, and all my single sisters will no longer be alone.”
She did not say whether she had asked authorities whether she could leave or return home.
But in a subsequent social media post, Wang said she had temporarily taken down some of the clips because they had gone viral and she thought that they had affected her date’s life.
It is unclear whether Wang is still stuck at the apartment. NBC News has reached out to her for comment.
Covid cases in Henan have continued to rise and the province reported 76 new local infections Thursday.
Wang’s predicament highlights the sudden disruptions to everyday life in China as authorities doggedly pursue a “zero-Covid” policy to eliminate all infections.
Authorities have locked down a total of around 20 million residents in three separate cities across China in a bid to stamp out outbreaks of both the delta and the omicron variants in the lead-up to the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, which are set to begin early next month.
Around 13 million residents in the city of Xi’an entered their third week under strict lockdown Tuesday, with reports from netizens suggesting difficulty accessing food supplies and medical assistance.
Wang has not said in any of her posts or interviews whether a shorter date is on the cards for the future.