A miscarriage suffered by a woman who had been prevented from entering a hospital in the city of Xian, capital of Shaanxi province, has raised fierce criticism of China’s “Covid zero” strategy and has led to a rare public retraction from officials linked to it. to the communist regime.
Eight months pregnant, the woman was refused medical care because she had not had a negative test for Covid in the last 48 hours. The abortion took place at the door of the place and was recorded by a family member, who shared photos and videos on social networks on the 1st. The post was deleted shortly after, but it was viewed 290 million times on WeChat, a kind of Chinese WhatsApp.
Xian, a historic city of about 13 million people, has been under strict confinement since December 23, after recording an outbreak of 200 cases of Covid. The population and the local government say that there is difficulty in supplying food, although the regime led by Xi Jinping denies it. International and domestic flights to the local airport have been suspended.
After the repercussion of the loss of the baby, the director of health services in Xian, Liu Shunzhi, publicly apologized, during an interview on Wednesday (5), for not having ensured access to medical treatment.
State media reported on Thursday that Liu and another health official had been warned by the Chinese Communist Party for mismanaging measures to combat the Covid outbreak. The hospital’s general manager and other staff were fired, according to a statement. An investigation remains under way at the province’s Health Commission and at the Asian country’s National Federation of Women.
In addition to the punishments, authorities also announced that they will open fast-track care in hospitals for the population at risk, such as pregnant women or patients with serious illnesses, although they did not mention that the reason for the change was the case of the woman who suffered the abortion. Health centers will also not be able to refuse patients based on Covid control.
The episode, as reported on the country’s social networks, is not an isolated one. Another Xian resident said on Thursday that her 61-year-old father had died of a heart attack after being refused entry to several hospitals for not having a negative test for the coronavirus on hand.
Another woman who was also pregnant and lost her baby said she was turned away from several hospitals on Dec. 29, when she started bleeding, according to the South China Morning Post. In a message on Weibo, a kind of Chinese Twitter, she said that the first hospital turned her down because she lived in an area where residents are banned from going out due to Covid.
She also reported that her husband and the police officers transporting the couple called other health centers, the epidemic command center and even a government hotline for help, but the calls were not answered. By the time she was finally accepted, she had already lost the baby. “I just felt like I was bleeding nonstop as I shook and shed tears,” he said. “The doctor asked why I was so late, but I couldn’t say a word.”
The volume of Covid cases in China is low when compared to other countries, where the omicron variant has led to a jump in registrations, but has been growing in recent weeks. The scenario worries the authorities due to the proximity of the Winter Olympic Games, scheduled for February this year.
Official figures show that the country has recorded 103,000 cases of coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic and about 4,700 deaths. As of Thursday, 189 cases were reported across the country — 63 in Xian alone. The city has 42,000 people in public quarantine facilities, according to Deputy Mayor Xu Mingfei.
Other episodes also sparked criticism of the Chinese strategy and rigidity in combating the health crisis. In the last week of December, for example, four people who allegedly violated a lockdown were forced to parade through the streets of a city in the south of the country carrying posters with their names and photos, in a scene that refers to the punishments of public humiliation applied during the Cultural Revolution in the middle of the last century.
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