China sends vulnerable senior citizens into makeshift COVID quarantine camps in Shanghai

Just a day after the violent clashes broke out between health workers in hazmat suits and the residents of China's second-largest city, Shanghai, reeling under a stringent COVID-19 lockdown, in a separate ordeal, the vulnerable Chinese population has come under the radar of the Xi Jinping administration. Elderly and immunocompromised senior citizens are being coerced into makeshift isolation wards by the Chinese National Health Commission workers.

On April 21, Thursday, Chinese nationals residing in the clamped down city of Shanghai took to the Twitter-like platform Weibo to narrate accounts of their sufferings as elderly in the households were dragged and loaded into vans in the middle of the night to be quarantined. As Beijing struggled to contain a new deadly wave of the novel coronavirus, desperate health officials broke into the home of a 94-year-old woman and roused her, and her 74-year-old son from the bed.

While they asked the two to head to the Chinese government designated quarantine centre, a request that the duo refused, explaining that they had tested negative for COVID-19, they were shoved, pulled by their clothing as the woman fell to the floor until they had both complied.

A huge public outcry over China's strict containment rules

The details of the incident, now creating ripples across Beijing, has shocked citizens. A post was shared by the victim’s granddaughter on Weibo, wherein she said that an exceedingly feeble woman named Apo Jin, born in 1929 and her son Zhang both of whom had previously tested positive for COVID-19, were asked to shift to the Taopu Community Health Service Center. The duo, isolating at home, was asked to adhere to the requirements of the Prevention and Control Office and was forcibly transferred.

“The community police and the staff of the neighbourhood committee came to the door together, and knocked on the door for a long time, but there was no response. Afraid of an accident, a locksmith was arranged to unlock the first door (this door is a partition door shared by two families in the corridor),” informed the woman’s granddaughter Zhi Ye in the post.

She added, that after a tussle, “the police entered the room and informed Apo Jin and Zhang of their obligation to cooperate with epidemic prevention and the arrangement of centralised transportation.” Condemning the harrowing act, a Weibo user wrote: "There's no limit to the cold-blooded cruelty and violence,” referring to the Chinese communist regime.

After a huge public outcry, the state health officials released a statement saying that they had involved the locksmith to break through the door thinking that "an accident had happened." Several such incidents were reported by Chinese nationals in Shanghai, a city under a strict clampdown after Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan announced that he would send anyone who tests COVID positive to a government quarantine centre.