By Nectar Gan
November 3, 2022
Source: CNN
Photo Source: Unsplash, Xia Yang Hong KongCNN — The death of a 3-year-old boy following a suspected gas leak at a locked down residential compound in northwestern China has triggered a fresh wave of outrage at the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy.
The boy’s father claimed in a social media post that Covid workers tried to prevent him from leaving their compound in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, to seek treatment for his child – causing a delay that he believes proved fatal.
A social media post by the father on Wednesday about his son’s death was met with an outpouring of public anger and grief, with several related hashtags racking up hundreds of millions of views over the following day on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform. “Three years of pandemic was his entire life,” a popular comment read. It’s the latest tragedy to have fueled a growing backlash against China’s unrelenting zero-Covid policy, which continues to upend daily life with incessant lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing mandates even as the rest of the world moves on from the pandemic. Numerous similar cases have involved people dying after being denied prompt access to emergency medical care during lockdowns – despite the insistence of Chinese officials, including leader Xi Jinping, that the country’s Covid policies “put people and their lives first.”
Locked down for a month Large parts of Lanzhou, including the neighborhood where the boy’s family live, have been locked down since early October.
The boy’s father said his wife and child both fell ill around noon on Tuesday, showing signs of gas poisoning. The mother’s condition improved after receiving CPR from the father, but the boy fell into a coma, according to the man’s social media post.
The father said he made numerous attempts to call both an ambulance and the police but failed to get through. He said he then went to plead for help from Covid workers who were enforcing the lockdown at their compound, but was rejected and told to seek help from officials in his community or keep calling for an ambulance himself.
He said the workers asked him to show a negative Covid test result, but he could not do so as no tests had been carried out at the compound in the previous 10 days.
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