World News | China Suspends 3 Officials as Anger Mounts over COVID Quarantine Bus Crash

Beijing, Sep 20 (PTI) China has suspended three officials for the fatal crash of a bus carrying people to a coronavirus quarantine centre in Guizhou province, amid rising anger over the strict enforcement of Beijing's Zero COVID policy in the country.

Twenty-seven people were killed and 20 others injured when the bus carrying people, who came in contact with those who tested COVID positive, to a quarantine centre crashed on a highway.

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Official media first reported the bus crash as a normal accident but later reports emerged on social media that the vehicle was transporting contacts of COVID-positive patients from Guiyang. The social media posts were soon censored.

Photos posted online showed everyone on the vehicle, including the driver, wearing white hazmat suits and goggles.

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The crash and the botched attempts to conceal that it was the bus carrying the people to COVID quarantine centre have evoked public anger in social media, rarely seen in recent times.

Following public anger, three officials were suspended.

Besides the suspension of three officials which included Zhu Gang, Yunyang district ruling Communist Party head of Guiyang on Monday, Lin Gang, deputy mayor of Guiyang, rendered a public apology.

Official media carried photos of Lin bowing in front of the cameras at the press briefing on Monday, apologizing to all for the great losses of people's lives caused by the accident.

Guiyang, a city of nearly six million people, went into a snap lockdown at the start of the month and many residents have been struggling to get enough food.

Wang Jie, a Guiyang official in charge of the quarantine transfers, said Saturday last that many of the thousands of people believed to have been exposed to the virus had been transferred to quarantine centres.

Because of the limited capacity in the city, some of those affected were taken to centres outside Guiyang, he said in a media conference about the outbreak.

The accident prompted criticism online about the aggressive control measures China is using to try to contain COVID-19 cases.

"What will the government say to people?" a user of the Chinese social media Weibo, akin to Twitter, said.

COVID didn't kill people, instead, they were killed on the way to be quarantined. That is really ridiculous, the user said.

The level of social media engagement on a single issue matched the February 2020 response to the death of Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor widely regarded as an early whistle-blower over the pandemic, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.

Many commenters expressed their sympathies for the crash victims, all residents from the same area of Yunyan district where Covid-19 cases have been recorded.

Media and communications studies lecturer Wilfred Wang from the University of Melbourne noted that many online commenters, especially on Douyin – the Chinese version of TikTok – were linking their frustration with the strict Covid-19 containment rules to their anger and sorrow over the crash.

"It seems like many have had enough with the strict Covid controls in China, but such sentiments are either contained by censorship or self-censorship," Wang told the Post. Beijing resident Lillian Song said she felt angry and concerned about the accident because “everyone can end up on a bus like that” due to the strict Covid-19 measures.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)