Image source,Getty Images
Xi’an, China, has been closed for epidemic prevention for more than half a month. Under strict lockdown measures, many pregnant women or critically ill patients have complained on social media about their experience of being rejected by the hospital. This has aroused public outrage in China.
Especially when a pregnant woman who was eight months pregnant said that she was refused entry by the hospital because her nucleic acid certificate had exceeded the validity period of several hours and caused a miscarriage. People have accused the local dogma and rigid anti-epidemic regulations. The authorities publicly apologized on Thursday (January 6) and asked hospitals not to refuse patients’ treatment on the grounds of the epidemic.
As of Thursday (January 6), this major northwestern town with a population of 13 million had nearly 1,900 confirmed cases in the current round of the epidemic. Residents also reported shortages of food and daily necessities, which reminded many people of the 76-day lockdown of Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak of the new crown epidemic nearly two years ago.
Pregnant women rejected
A video began to circulate widely on the Chinese Internet on Tuesday (January 4). In this one-minute video, a woman sits outside the hospital with a pool of blood under her feet.
A person claiming to be a family member of the woman posted on Weibo that the pregnant woman was sent to the high-tech hospital in western Xi’an at 8 pm on January 1, but the hospital refused her admission because her nucleic acid test result was valid for more than four hours. .
“My aunt is very difficult to sit on a chair like supporting her body with her hands, blood is flowing down the chair and pants, and the ground is full of blood,” the netizen wrote.
She said that the pregnant woman was admitted to the hospital after waiting two hours, but her eight-month-old fetus had died.
Image source,Getty Images
After the city was closed, residents were not allowed to go out.
This incident triggered a fierce response on the Internet. Many netizens criticized the local epidemic prevention measures for being too rude.
“This mother has been waiting in the cold wind for eight months. The child was gone, and she was still at the entrance of the hospital. Thinking about it, she was suffocating,” wrote one comment, which received 230,000. Likes.
“Essentially because of the official status ideology! You have a miscarriage and don’t care about my business, but if there is one more infection, the official will be gone. Of course, the official position matters. What is the official position?” another netizen commented.
The authorities responded to the criticism. The director of the Xi’an Municipal Health Commission bowed and apologized to the miscarried pregnant woman at a press conference on Thursday (January 6) and characterized the incident as a “responsible accident.”
Gaoxin Hospital was also instructed to apologize to the society. The hospital announced the suspension of the general manager of the hospital and the removal of the heads of the outpatient department and medical department.
Not alone
But the experience of this pregnant woman also prompted other Xi’an residents to share their own stories, showing that her experience was not unique.
Another pregnant woman who was six weeks pregnant posted on Wednesday (January 5) that she was “sorrowful and empathetic” about the experience of the former pregnant woman, because she herself appeared red on the morning of December 29 and was accompanied by a police escort. , Many hospitals still refuse to diagnose.
One of the hospitals stated that she “belongs to a closed zone”, and the other said that the hospital “only accepts red and yellow codes”, but the green code cannot receive treatment. The closed zone refers to someone who has been diagnosed in the community where she lives, and the green code means that she is not a close contact.
The 28-year-old pregnant woman also said that during this period, her husband called several public hospitals, but they were rejected, and the 120 emergency call was still unanswered. She was not admitted until six hours later. Admitted to the hospital. She was eventually forced to abort due to heavy bleeding.
The experience of the second pregnant woman was reported by China News Weekly and other official media, which caused the Xi’an authorities to again face many criticisms. One of the hospitals that refused the consultation responded on Thursday (January 6) that this was due to “unskilled business.”
Image source,Reuters
Empty streets in Xi’an after the city was closed.
In addition, some severe and emergency patients are rejected by hospitals frequently. According to a report by the Chinese media “Dahe Daily”, a 39-year-old man suffered from chest tightness on December 31, but was rejected by the “120” emergency center because he did not have a nucleic acid test result within 48 hours. After he got the nucleic acid results, he was rejected by three hospitals one after another. Until the fourth hospital was admitted, the doctor said that “there was little hope for rescue”, and he eventually died after rescue.
Some netizens also posted that his mother was asked by the hospital to go for hemodialysis treatment three times a week, but the epidemic prevention and control point blocked it many times, and was refused even if he presented the certificate. He said that because the failure of timely dialysis may be life-threatening, the mother had to risk crossing the highway to the hospital.
“No one has ever seriously discussed the lessons we learned from Wuhan, and there has been no debate. The (official) narrative is only about the success of the Chinese model and the incompetence of Western democracies,” the Council on Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations) Global Health Senior researcher Huang Yanzhong said.
He told the BBC that the only thing officials have learned is to respond to the epidemic with a blunt “zero out” strategy.
Image source,Getty Images
Xi’an is carrying out large-scale nucleic acid testing.
China’s top-down policymaking means that when local officials are assigned to broad tasks, “they often have no choice but to rely on a rigorous, one-size-fits-all approach to complete their work”, as people have seen in Xi’an Extreme measures.
The anger of the people also made Sun Chunlan, Vice Premier of the State Council of China, make a statement. She said that the occurrence of such a problem was “very sad and deeply guilty” and exposed the problems in prevention and control work.
“The prevention and control of the epidemic itself is for the health of the people and for the protection of every life,” she said. “We must not use any excuse to refuse medical treatment.”
Closing the city for epidemic prevention
Nearly two years ago, the new crown epidemic broke out in Wuhan. The Chinese authorities took strict blockade and large-scale nucleic acid testing measures to successfully control the epidemic. These measures are used as templates to extinguish every subsequent outbreak.
Liu Haodian, a public policy expert at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, pointed out that the power of local governments in China is decentralized. Many local officials “set very ambitious goals to achieve zero, but the central government provides few resources”. There is not much power to deal with the epidemic.
Christian Goebel, a professor at the University of Vienna who specializes in China, analyzed in an online post that this means that “on the one hand, local officials cannot block an area alone, but on the other hand, they need to be within a short period of time. Deliver food to more than one million residents.”
Image source,Getty Images
Anti-epidemic personnel and volunteers distributed vegetables to residents.
“If it succeeds, the credit will go to the central government. If it fails, local officials will be blamed and fired.”
At present, two senior officials in Xi’an have been removed from their posts due to the epidemic, and dozens of others have been punished.
China is one of the few countries in the world that still implements the “zero clearing” policy. A total of 100,000 people have been diagnosed with the new crown pneumonia in the country, and the death toll is 4636. These figures are quite low for this populous country. However, as strict measures affect life and economic activities, more and more people are calling for the government to relax. limit.
Some netizens began to compare Xi’an’s extreme epidemic prevention measures to another virus. “In Xi’an, you can starve to death, you can die of illness, but you can’t die of the new crown,” a Weibo user wrote.