No, this doesn't apply to me.  I'm fortunate all along to have an awesome boss who is stuck in Vietnam during all this uncertainty.  He told all of us teachers to take our time and make our own decisions about when or whether to return to China.  In a way I was very lucky here for many reasons.  Not only was this boss amazing, but there was only a few more months in the school year anyway.  He would be quitting and retiring soon, and I already put in my notice to quit anyway. 

Most likely I could just teach online until July and still collect a paycheque from the current school before getting a new job somewhere else.  My current boss would end up doing the same thing in Vietnam anyway.

[Update April 2024]  For whatever reason I was a complete idiot for not realizing all these facts at the time.  Half the staff did exactly the above and chose to remain stranded abroad whereas I freaked out.

But for friends and colleagues at other schools, they were basically summoned back to work in China.  This was super odd since only a few weeks ago they were saying don't go back to China.  One guy did and then regretted it and flew back to his home country. 

So which was it?  You're not allowed to go back to China or you're not allowed to not go back?  The whole thing was pretty much fucked.

A leaked document from a competitor school basically said all teachers had to be back before a certain date, March 5, or they wouldn't get paid.  This was all despite the fact that most schools had switched to online learning or were in the process of doing so by then.  I could just teach online in Pattaya or Siem Reap or wherever.  But not these others, they had to literally be in China and face quarantine etc... to basically do the same online teaching I was doing.

[Update April 2024]  Again, if only I had been able to clue into all this at the time.

Put all this together I began to surmise that schools in Shanghai would probably resume in-person classes in late April or May.  So that focused me on re-planning the rest of this bike trip.  Namely, the general plan at this point was to keep on sending out applications and then do interviews online while biking in Thailand.  My main sights were on the Malaysia job.  If I got it, then I would change course and bike to Malaysia to leave the bike at the new school.  

[Update November 2022]  Things did not go even remotely according to that plan, although they could have.  Once the coronavirus became a pandemic, all countries basically closed their borders very quickly and it was a race against time to find somewhere to go.  I then got into panic mode.  At the time of writing, the coronavirus was already spreading around the globe, we just didn't know.

The whole assumption that everyone got wrong was that covid would be confined to China.  That is to say, we all assumed they could use some sort of zero-covid strategy to contain it.  When they eventually tried, it was well too late for that.  If lockdowns have any chance of success they have to be done at the earliest possible time.  Since nobody knows when that is, lockdowns are virtually doomed to fail.