As Australians with overseas relatives know, border closures have inadvertently caused a lot of heartache for those unable to reunite.
While most Australian states have reopened to international arrivals, China is still heavily restricting the flow of people into the country as it strives to maintain negligible COVID-19 numbers.
With the country currently hosting the Winter Olympics, global attention has once again shifted to the country's decision to stick with a COVID-zero policy.
Most analysts believe the closed border will remain until at least the end of this year, and China's government hasn’t publicly announced a road map to reopening.
Chris, who does not want to use his full name, has had first-hand experience in navigating China's strict border system.
Having spent two years trying to reunite with his wife and two-year-old son in China, the Australian man is now facing further delays after testing positive to the Omicron variant.
Chris was confined to a locked hospital room with other patients for 36 days after testing positive to the new COVID-19 strain upon arrival in a major southern Chinese city on Boxing Day.
Chris, who has lived in Asia for 20 years managing international hotels, said he had no symptoms the entire time and daily testing showed he cleared the virus from his body after 15 days.
But that wasn't the end of the saga.
He was later moved to a different hospital for a fortnight of monitoring, but a scheduled release last week from the locked room he shared with two other men was delayed by another positive PCR test.
"I told them it can't be right, it had to be a mistake," Chris told the ABC from his hospital bed.
"How can you test negative for two-and-a-half weeks and then one out of two nostril swabs shows a strong positive result?"
Having continued to test negative in subsequent tests, Chris was supposed to be released into home quarantine this week, which he originally planned to do in Qingdao — the north-eastern city where his wife and son are living.
But the expiration of his 30-day Chinese entry visa while he was in hospital has forced him to stay in southern China and undergo another 14 days of 'home quarantine' in a hotel room.
His wife Grace said the positive test upon arrival and its knock-on effect was a crushing blow right at the final stage of their two-year ordeal.
"When the hospital rang and confirmed he's positive, I just said 'when is this going to end?'" she told the ABC from Qingdao.
The flight from Sydney in late December and hotel quarantine was supposed to be the final hurdle in a prolonged bureaucratic nightmare for the Adelaide man.
Chris has battled border closures in three countries throughout the pandemic to see the son he only spent a week with after the birth.
His quest to properly meet his child highlights the costs that China's COVID-zero border closures are continuing to inflict on people unlucky enough to be separated from loved ones abroad.
Three countries, two COVID-zero policies and one devastating outbreak
Chris met his wife while working in China a decade ago, and his job later took them to Indonesia to oversee a major new hotel project.
Grace returned to China in 2019 so she could be close to her parents when she gave birth.
As their son Harrison was born in December of that year, multiple patients were presenting to several hospitals in the central city of Wuhan with a mystery pneumonia.
It would up-end their family plans in an almost unimaginable way.
Chris made plans to fly back into China a month later for the Lunar New Year, but by then a full-blown pandemic had broken out and his wife advised him to wait another month or two to protect the infant from any risk.
Soon China's borders closed, locking Chris out.
So they looked at flying Grace and Harrison to Indonesia once he was old enough to fly long-haul.
But COVID-19 was ravaging the country, expats were being evacuated and by April 2020 the borders were shut to foreigners there too.
"The second half of 2020 became very stressful, the feeling of helplessness was so strong," Chris told the ABC.
"In our team, I had dozens of people at any one time infected with COVID-19. We had every protocol in place.
"During construction, seven or eight of the senior contractors died – guys in the late 30s and 40s – it was shocking."
Indonesia's closed borders also made it difficult for Chris's company to send in a replacement for the project, leaving him to stay on and finish it before a promised transfer to China to help with his family situation.
By the middle of 2021, the end was in sight and he began trying to apply for a work visa to China – the one type of visa foreigners could still obtain during the pandemic.
"The Chinese visa office in Surabaya knew me pretty well by this point but they told me their office is closed due to COVID and to try again in a few weeks," he said.
But it didn't reopen.
With his Indonesian visa about to expire and no way to directly apply to go to China, Chris sought to fly to Sydney, which was going through a Delta wave and under lockdown.
After spending weeks trying to secure a flight, he quarantined for two weeks in a Sydney hotel but things didn't go smoothly in Australia.
It took him three months of navigating closed state borders, overseas vaccine certificate issues and calls to multiple embassies before he was granted a Chinese visa.
Flights to China are greatly reduced from their pre-COVID-19 capacity and the earliest one Chris could find was on Boxing Day.
So that meant scrambling to get a pre-flight PCR test on the day before Christmas when lines at testing clinics were snaking around city blocks during Sydney's Omicron surge.
But finally, on December 26, on a packed A380 China Southern with air hosts and hostesses in full PPE suits, Chris was off to China, with 21 days of hotel quarantine the final hurdle to seeing his son.
A peek into China's strict COVID quarantine system
After arriving in China, Chris spent a night in hotel quarantine before he got the call that he had tested positive to the Omicron variant.
Authorities came to dress him in full PPE and took him to a hospital where he spent 18 days confined to a room with young nurses performing two PCR tests every three days – one for each nostril.
After consecutive negative tests, Chris was taken to a second hospital for recovering COVID-19 patients.
He says the door of the room he stayed in was locked, as was a balcony door, which didn't open beyond a centimetre to allow some fresh air in.
Not feeling sick at all, he paced back and forth in the three-metre space around his bed for daily exercise.
Meanwhile, his wife Grace was making increasingly frantic phone calls to government hotlines trying to arrange 'home' quarantine accommodation for her husband's release.
The expiration of his entry visa meant he couldn't fly to Qingdao and had to remain in southern China to sort things out.
Eventually, the authorities found him a hotel and Grace and Harrison are now planning to fly to see Chris before his release.
Having now spent almost 50 days in quarantine in China and undertaking an estimated 80 COVID tests in two years, Chris is eager to be reunited with his family.
"There have been times when I've been down about the situation but Grace helped me restore faith that we'll get through," he said.
"The moment he walks out of the quarantine hotel, we'll be there," she said.
Both parents are fascinated by how two-year-old Harrison will react.
"Harrison doesn't understand, daddy to him is someone who appears and talks on a phone video screen," she said.
"I think when the moment comes we'll do a video call like usual, and then his real daddy will appear."
