The three-year-old’s death is the latest, but hardly the last, tragedy that has shocked the nation. The Chinese have obeyed the strict prevention rules for almost three years now.
BEIJING Corona guards did not let the father take his three-year-old son, who had carbon monoxide poisoning, to the hospital on Tuesday. The city of Lanzhou in Gansu province in northwest China was under strict corona lockdown. Residents are not allowed to leave their residential block.
Corona guards told the man to order an ambulance for his child, but it never came. The desperate father finally broke through the fence and the neighbors helped him into a taxi. On the way, they still had to stop at a checkpoint.
The hospital was located ten minutes away, but due to the obstruction, it took 2.5 hours to get there. When the child was finally treated, there was nothing more that could be done.
Chinese social media effervescent. Users mourn that the child lived his entire short life during the corona era and died because of the prevention measures. They blame the authorities for the boy’s death. The most popular thread about the child’s fate has been read 380 million times on Twitter-like Weibo.
The death of a child is not the first and probably not the last sad story of the corona era. In January, for example, two women had a miscarriage in the city of Xi’an when the hospital staff did not let them in due to the lack of a corona test certificate.
China’s infection rates are few on a global scale. In Lanzhou, which has a population of four million, there are only dozens of infections every day. Still, the city is under lockdown and residents have to stay in their homes.
According to official data, there were 3,372 infections in the entire country of 1.4 billion inhabitants yesterday, Wednesday. The majority of infections were asymptomatic. For comparison, there are currently about a thousand patients in hospital due to corona infection in Finland.
Still, the restrictions are increasing again in China. The policy is that all corona infections must be eradicated. In Beijing, residents queue at corona test kiosks at least every other day.
All of us in Beijing live in constant readiness to at least be quarantined at home if exposure to the infection has been detected in the surrounding area.
Yesterday toldthat Finland’s embassy in Beijing closed its doors to the public due to the controversy over corona restrictions. The tower house, where the embassy and numerous other organizations are located, unexpectedly required a corona test taken within a day. It may be against the Vienna Convention, according to which free movement to diplomatic missions must not be prevented.
Corona regulations come out of the blue in China and people often don’t get to know why or by whom the regulations have been made. Kentvatvaki keeps an extremely strict line just in case, so that the higher authorities do not accuse them of breaking the rules.
The rules, on the other hand, are fluctuating and changing. Closures are imposed suddenly when, according to the authorities, exposure has been detected in the area.
More and more people start to rebel against oppressive corona rules. Last weekend, employees at Foxconn’s factory, which manufactures iPhone mobile phones, broke out of the factory area after being in corona quarantine for weeks. They complained that they were running out of food.
The employees told to the BBC (switching to another service), that rumors were spreading at the factory that the authorities were conducting a cruel human experiment on their resistance to infection. The workers feared for their lives.
The problem in China is that information related to the pandemic is not shared. The people are not told about the reasons for the extremely drastic measures and when China will possibly return to normal everyday life.
The Chinese have long believed the word of the authorities that the coronavirus infection can be dangerous. After three years of restrictions, tournament fatigue starts to show.
What thoughts do China’s corona restrictions evoke? You can discuss the topic on 4.11. until 11 p.m.
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