Via The Washington Post: In China’s Xian lockdown, tales of anguish as hospitals demand patients be covid-free. Excerpt:
On the first day of 2022, outside Xian Gaoxin Hospital, in the middle of China’s worst coronavirus outbreak since Wuhan, a woman eight months pregnant miscarried after being refused care until she had tested negative for the virus.
After feeling pain in her belly, the woman called an ambulance, according to an account from her niece posted Tuesday evening on the microblog Weibo. Without a negative coronavirus test, she had to wait outside emergency care for two hours until staffers relented when they saw that she was bleeding heavily.
But by then, the woman had miscarried, said the post from her niece, which was deleted after gaining nearly 6 million views. Neither woman was identified, and The Washington Post was unable to independently confirm details of the account. An employee of the hospital’s quality-of-care department who answered the phone Wednesday said the matter has been investigated and that an official statement would be released soon.
The reported tragedy has tapped into mounting anguish and disbelief about dysfunction in Xian, the central Chinese city of 13 million that has imposed China’s strictest all-resident lockdown since Wuhan two years ago. Nearly 1,800 symptomatic infections have been confirmed in the city after the local government ordered mass testing and centralized quarantine to halt spread of the virus.
As the rest of the world has become resigned to strategies of mitigating the virus, China has stuck fast to a policy of attempting to completely cut off transmission as soon as new outbreaks emerge, an approach it calls “dynamic zero covid.”
That whack-a-mole strategy has been largely effective. The Chinese Communist Party’s decision to make covid-19 prevention a top priority spurred local officials to impose rapid and severe — but relatively targeted — lockdowns whenever infections appeared. In the past year, even larger outbreaks were limited to a few hundred cases.
But the problems in Xian caused by the city’s poorly managed, containment-at-all-costs approach are raising alarm about unacceptable human distress when the unyielding policy goes wrong.
Residents, who are confined to their homes, already feared delayed or insufficient food deliveries in some areas of the city. They are now worried that hospitals, overwhelmed with coronavirus cases, are struggling to provided adequate care to non-coronavirus patients, a repeat of similar chaotic scenes in Wuhan nearly two years ago.
By Wednesday morning, the reported miscarriage had become one of the top trending topics on Weibo, as outraged users called for the hospital to take responsibility should it become clear that the delay caused the loss.
