Shanghai nursing home resident was mistakenly taken to the morgue while still alive, state media reported, as the city’s Covid-19 outbreak and prolonged lockdown stretch aged-care and medical facilities to breaking point.
Local media reported that the municipal government acknowledged the incident and launched an investigation. Discussions on social media revealed that while the nursing facility apologized for the mistake, widespread outrage and condemnation has resulted from the incident among Chinese citizens.
The mistake comes as Shanghai’s lockdown enters its fifth week and new COVID cases remain in the thousands each day. With 25 million people living in Shanghai, the tight restrictions of compulsory isolation and close contacts has caused havoc with access to essential medical care. Most of the more than 400 deaths in the latest wave have been elderly people with underlying health conditions, with reports that some nursing homes weren’t reporting deaths.
Continue reading: Shanghai Separates Parents From Children in the COVID-19 Expansion
While it remains unclear whether the person was infected with Covid or vaccinated, the low inoculation rate among China’s elderly remains the country’s Achilles heel in the fight against the pandemic. Shanghai has a 62% rate of people over 60 who have not been fully vaccinated and only 15% over 80. According to local authorities, Sunday’s average death rate was 84.
“This is murder,” one Weibo user wrote among a raft of other angry posts. “The confidence crisis in the city is getting too bad.”
Local media reports that the resident of nursing has been taken to hospital and is now stable. The Bureau of Civil Affairs of Putuo, where the house is situated, stated that it would investigate the incident seriously and report the findings once the investigation was complete.
“This has nothing to do with the epidemic, or any kind of normal negligence and irresponsibility, this is a serious dereliction of duty that almost led to death,” Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the Communist Party backed Global TimesA newspaper editor and an important commentator wrote to his Weibo profile.
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