Hospital authorities in Xi’an, China’s northernmost city, have been reprimanded after a pregnant lady miscarried after being denied admittance due to a lack of current COVID-19 test results.
Gaoxin Hospital General Manager Fan Yuhui has been suspended, and the heads of the outpatient department and medical department have been fired, according to the local administration.
The incident “raised broad worry in society and had a serious social impact,” according to a government statement.
On New Year’s Day, the woman waited outside the hospital on a pink plastic stool until she began bleeding. A puddle of blood was evident by her feet in a video made by her husband and widely distributed.
Xi’an, a 13-million-strong metropolis, has been under rigorous lockdown for more than two weeks, sparking complaints about food shortages and overbearing conduct by officials under great pressure to reduce COVID-19 case counts.
Following the event, the city claimed it conducted an inquiry, but provided no further details. The hospital has been ordered to apologize publicly, compensate victims, and “optimize the medical treatment procedure.”
It was unclear how many hospital employees were reprimanded in total, but they joined a growing list of authorities who had been disciplined for the outbreak’s treatment.
The governing Communist Party had issued formal warnings to two additional high-ranking officials at the Xi’an Emergency Center and the Xi’an Municipal Health Commission, according to the municipal administration.
On Thursday, Xi’an reported another 63 instances of COVID-19, the delta form, increasing the total number of cases in the month-long outbreak to almost 1,800, with no deaths reported.
Officials said the city, which is home to the famous Terracotta Warriors monuments as well as important enterprises, has effectively ceased community transmission because new cases were found among those who had previously been quarantined.
While the numbers are tiny in comparison to outbreaks in the United States and abroad, they occur less than a month before the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.
This has put officials under a lot of pressure to keep infections under control, forcing a step up in China’s “zero tolerance” approach of quarantining every case, mass testing, and putting entire towns on lockdown.
All foreign flights were canceled at Xi’an’s main airport on Wednesday. Domestic flights had previously been halted as part of the city’s encirclement. Thousands of sick people’s close friends and family members have been quarantined.
Following an outbreak in Henan province, just west of Shaanxi province, whose capital is Xi’an, authorities are enacting more strict safeguards.
On Thursday, a total of 64 new cases were recorded, and officials have been imposing a restriction on inter-city travel except for extraordinary circumstances.
Yuzhou, a city in the province, was also put under lockdown after three asymptomatic cases were discovered. As of Wednesday afternoon, the overall number of cases had climbed to nine with symptoms and 23 without.
In the metropolis of 1.17 million people, only emergency vehicles are allowed on the roads, classes have been canceled, and businesses that cater to the public have closed for everything except the most basic necessities.
Despite the fact that only a few instances have been found, several other cities in the province have ordered mass testing and closed public venues.
In nearby Shanxi province, the city of Yongji, with a population of about 500,000, was put on lockdown after indications of coronavirus were discovered at a train station departure point.
