The father of a three-year-old boy claims that the covid zero policy killed his son

Chinese President Xi Jinping assures that his zero covid policy has saved millions of lives in China, but in the more than two and a half years of its implementation, the strict isolation measures have also claimed some victims.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
04 November 2022 Friday 04:30
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The father of a three-year-old boy claims that the covid zero policy killed his son

Chinese President Xi Jinping assures that his zero covid policy has saved millions of lives in China, but in the more than two and a half years of its implementation, the strict isolation measures have also claimed some victims. The last and one of the youngest, this week. A three-year-old boy suffered carbon monoxide poisoning on Tuesday at his home in a trusting building and his father accuses the health authorities of having prevented him from accessing medical care that, had he had it sooner, would have saved his life. life. His story has lit up the country's social networks.

"Personally, I think he was indirectly killed" because of the severe restrictions, the father, Tuo Shilei, told Reuters by telephone on Wednesday from the northwestern city of Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, which has been stringing lockdowns. for several months. In his building, the neighbors had been confined for ten days and taking daily tests when the misfortune occurred.

According to the father's account in various media, Tuo's wife became dizzy and fell to the ground, affected by a gas leak in the house while cooking around noon on Tuesday. Her condition improved after the man turned off her boiler and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

His son, Wenxuan, who was sleeping, had also lost consciousness and had urinary insufficiency. He desperately called the emergency room for about an hour for an ambulance, which never showed up. He performed resuscitation, which helped the little boy slightly, and he ran out of the flat to approach the hospital on his own.

However, at the entrance to the community building were the health personnel in charge of enforcing the strict confinement measures. They told him that he could not go in because they still did not have the result of his last PCR.

Desperate and not wanting to wait any longer for the ambulance, Tuo went through the fences with his son and a "good Samaritan" who was passing by called a taxi to take them to a hospital, where the doctors could not save him.

This is how Tuo, a 32-year-old butcher shop owner, sums up the ordeal: "There was the covid situation at the checkpoint. The staff did not act, and then they ignored and avoided the problem, and then we were blocked by another checkpoint." . "Help was not provided. This sequence of events caused the death of my son," he insists in his conversation with Reuters.

"My son could have been saved if he had arrived at the hospital earlier," Tuo wrote when he gave the news publicly in a message posted on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, which sparked a wave of outrage among users of the platform. Although the publication has been removed, screenshots of the message have continued to circulate on the network and the tags related to the case have between 150 and 800 million readings. "The three years of the pandemic were his whole life," read one of the most followed labels. The outrage spread to the streets of the Tuo family's neighborhood, where some residents went out to protest on Tuesday night, according to videos of neighbors viewed by the BBC.

In his publication, Tuo explained that after the death of his son, a retired local official offered him 100,000 yuan (about 14,100 euros) in exchange for his silence, according to The China Project, a New York-based media specialized in the giant Asian. He not only rejected the offer, but also publicly demanded responsibility for the death of his son.

Tuo's version contradicts that of the local police, who reported on Tuesday night that they had received a call about the incident at 1:43 p.m. and had helped send the two people to hospital 13 minutes later. The statement listed carbon monoxide poisoning due to "misuse of the liquefied gas stove" as the cause of death. Tuo, on the contrary, assures that the agents arrived at his house only after the boy arrived at the hospital. The health authorities of Lanzhou have promised to investigate the event.

During last month's ruling Communist Party Congress, President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China's commitment to covid policy. The confinements are prolonged and chained in cities across the country despite the effects on the economy. A curtailment of freedoms that directly or indirectly has caused human loss.

Two months ago, 27 people died in the accident of a bus transporting residents to a quarantine center. Last January, a woman also denounced on Weibo that her father had died of cardiovascular problems after many hospitals refused to treat him during Xi'an's confinement, when its 13 million inhabitants were confined in her houses.