As the Chinese city of Xi’an claims victory this week in its fight to stop the community spread of COVID-19, sad tales of loss and despair have surfaced on social media – given the enormous human cost of China’s zero-Covid disclosure policy.
The city of 13 million has been under strict lockdown since December 23, as it battles the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak since Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. But local officials have faced public outcry over the alleged incompetence, and overly harsh measures that critics say harm the lives of those they should be protecting.
Over the past two weeks, Chinese social media has been flooded with posts from residents who say they have not received food, basic supplies, even medical care – painting an image of local government dysfunction. Because there is pressure on local authorities to contain Kovid. Ahead of major Lunar New Year celebrations and the Beijing Winter Olympics.
A heavily pregnant woman was reportedly turned away from the hospital on New Year’s Day because she did not have a valid COVID-19 test, according to a post by a user who said she was the woman’s niece. In a video posted on January 3, the woman is seen sitting outside with blood around her legs. She was eventually admitted two hours later – but suffered a miscarriage, before the post was widely shared on Chinese micro-blogging platform Weibo.
A staff member at Xi’an Gaoxin Hospital, where the woman sought care, told CNN they were investigating the incident, and the hospital initially refused the woman in accordance with the government’s COVID-19 regulations, But declined to comment further.
On China’s Instagram-like platform Xiaohongshu, a user appealed for help on Sunday after a local hospital refused to admit her father, who had just suffered a heart attack, because he was in the city’s “medium-sized” hospital. Lived in “risk zone”.
She later updated the post to say that her father was allowed an emergency operation when his condition worsened after several hours. “The delay was too long and the rescue failed. I don’t have a father anymore,” she wrote.
The woman posted her encounter in more detail on Weibo on Wednesday night. Her emotional account immediately went viral, attracting 630,000 “likes” and shared more than 110,000 times as of Thursday.
Another video posted online shows a woman begging a Covid control worker for sanitary pads at a quarantine hotel on New Year’s Day. The post was viewed millions of times before it was deleted, with the woman saying she had tried calling several government departments for menstrual products – to no avail.
The woman later posted that she had received supplies from quarantine workers and said she regretted filming the original video.
CNN cannot independently verify the authenticity of these videos and posts, and has reached out to the authors as well as the Xi’an municipal government for comment.
The poignant accounts have sparked sympathy and anger online, with many sacrificing questions in the name of pandemic control.
A Weibo user posted, “No one cares what you die from – other than COVID-19.”
Following public outcry, Xi’an officials told a news conference on Wednesday that hospitals “should not use the pretext of epidemic prevention and control to avoid treating patients,” including critical patients such as pregnant women.
On Thursday, Xi’an authorities said the general manager of Xi’an Gaoxin Hospital had been suspended, staff involved in the incident were removed from their positions, and ordered the hospital to apologize to the public. The disciplinary watchdog of the ruling Communist Party in the city issued an internal warning to the head of the Xi’an Health Commission as well as two other public health officials.
But this action has failed to quell the outrage. On Weibo, the top-rated comment under a state media post about the sentencing said: “It just goes to show: COVID-19 can’t kill you, but bureaucrats can.”
Zero-Covid Limits
For most of the pandemic, China has managed to keep its caseload low with its “zero-Covid” approach – meaning no local transmission – even as the rest of the world embraces living with the virus. .
There have been occasional outbreaks, but authorities have managed to contain them in a matter of weeks by following a playbook of mass testing, partial or complete lockdown, contact tracing and quarantine. The city of Yuzhou in Henan province, home to about 1.2 million residents, was also placed under lockdown after three asymptomatic cases were reported.
This rigorous approach is widely popular among the Chinese public, which is “used to a zero-Covid environment,” said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “So many people have not been exposed to the virus, and given that inactivated vaccines are not effective in preventing new infections, zero-Covid becomes a self-justified strategy.”
In a statement on Monday, the Xi’an government acknowledged “some problems” in providing daily supplies to residents, but said it was “improving the situation”. Community transmission in the city has been “brought under control” and the rapid spread of the virus has been “contained”, state-run Xinhua news agency said in an article on Wednesday, citing local officials.
The city confirmed 63 new locally transmitted cases on Wednesday, bringing the total caseload since December 9 to 1,856. Cases had climbed to or near 100 in the past days, a significant drop from 35 on Tuesday.
But many Xi’an residents have pushed back the authorities’ claims. Although the government has distributed food to some people during the entire lockdown, others say they have not received their supplies, or have been given food only a few times throughout the two weeks.
Others pointed out that the rate of community transmission could be distorted, with more than 42,000 residents being moved to government quarantine facilities. Videos from quarantine sites showing Spartan rooms with metal bunk beds and no mattresses have fueled further criticism online.
A Weibo user posted, “’Zero community covid’ is such a clever word, as long as we only need to take out patients and close contacts, until Xi’an cases are reduced to zero.”
“If there are no people in the neighborhood, there is definitely no community transmission there,” wrote another user.
Rising pressure
These measures, and the chaos unfolding for those stuck at home, bring to mind the burden borne by citizens of China’s COVID strategy, its questionable stability – and the growing political pressure on local authorities to bring it under control.
Officers who struggle to contain the COVID outbreak often face suspension or dismissal. Last summer, more than 40 local officials across the country were punished for failing to control the Delta outbreak that has spread to more than half of China’s provinces. This week, the party secretary of Yanta district in Xi’an, one of the worst-hit regions, was also sacked.
The pressure was on for most of the pandemic, with the ruling Communist Party often acknowledging the success of its zero-Covid strategy as an ideological and moral victory in comparison to Westerners who struggle to control their own outbreaks. Were.
But that pressure is now intensifying as February draws to a close – bringing with it the Winter Olympics, a major point of national pride, and the Lunar New Year, the nation’s biggest annual holiday, when hundreds of millions of people typically travel home. Huh.
With the arrival of these two incidents, “the Xi’an authorities were asked to achieve (zero community transmission) by January 4th,” Huang said. “These local officials are facing such pressure,” Huang said, referring to the dismissal of Yanta’s party secretary.
The chaos in Xi’an also reflects a gap in local governance capacity, he said – Shanghai, for example, has a highly efficient and capable bureaucracy that allows officials to quickly detect outbreaks, conduct contact tracing and maintain the city’s security. Allows to escape. Widespread lockdown observed in Yuzhou and Xi’an.
In contrast, both of those cities have “relatively low local state capacity…” When capacity is low, government officials are likely to turn to heavy-handed, indiscriminate, and even excessive measures, which significantly increase the cost of implementing this (zero-Covid) strategy.”
The strategy has so far worked relatively well in shielding most of China from the virus – but its limits are also becoming increasingly clear.
“China is not epidemiologically or psychologically prepared for the Omicron version,” Huang said. “The problem is that we don’t know if (zero-Covid) can still be effective in dealing with more transmissible forms.”