How're you doing out there? Hope your QR's looking green. We've been checking ours every couple of hours. What would even happen if it turned a different color? Helicopters and sirens? Would we just get a notification? Would we just... disappear? Weird times. But things have been looking up a bit. Here's what the last week has been like in Shanghai during what all the Chinese media are now calling the Special Period (非常时期).

* Still quiet! But a little less, actually. There's been a torrent of openings coming in this week. Our list has blown up past 250 places. Including *gasp* some nightlife! Bar Rouge is open! Celia is open! C's and Inferno had time for the stench to dissipate and are open again! All back this week with temperature checks and customer limits. A couple (the opposite of "some") clubs are peeking their head over the quarantine tape but keeping it hush-hush. The big clubs remain closed. Still! Actual life, in the night, as in past 8pm. We got a new round of fatalities. Stone Brewing, which had been burning the candle at both ends, closed and then closed. Found 158 lost Little Creatures and DEUS. Xintiandi lost El Luchador and Va Bene and there will be more to come. Color codes got rolled out. It's a little creepy. But all in the name of safety and security! For which no personal sacrifice is too great. We've seen and heard about it being used a couple places around Jing'an, so that's... something we're going to have to learn to live with. The QR codes on the metro, however, aren't compulsory. Yet. What has become compulsory is 14-day quarantine for people returning from hotspot countries. Travelers entering China from Italy, Iran, South Korea and Japan are being told to either self-quarantine at home or, in some cases, being taken to quarantine centers (read: hotels). The one-month visa extension has become a two-month visa extension, which is nice for anyone with residence permits, business visas, tourist visas and student visas expiring soon. We wrote about it. We haven't seen anyone doing the Wuhan shake despite the internet getting pretty excited about it. We still recommend the elbow or, in special circumstances, the knee. So Shanghai wasn't normal all week long. The slew of restaurants and bars reopening are a very welcome relief from home cooking, but people aren't rushing back. Some fancy dining places on the Bund have had zero-customer nights, and even downtown it's still mostly crickets and tumbleweed. Last week we called it tentative. This week we're calling it... a synonym for tentative. Timid? Timid.