We’ve written several times about the strict COVID lockdown happening in the Chinese city of Xi’an right now. More than a week ago there were already reports that some residents were complaining they were starving because they couldn’t go to the store to shop for food. Just a few days ago there were reports that residents had resorted to bartering out of desperation.

But the strict lockdown rules really angered a lot of Chinese citizens this week after a woman who was 8-months pregnant was refused entry to a hospital because she hadn’t had a COVID test recently enough. Instead of getting help, she was forced to sit outside for two hours and her baby was stillborn. There’s no doubt that this really happened because there’s video of the woman outside the hospital, bleeding all over the street.

“The blood ran down the chair and her pants, the ground was covered in blood,” a user named Biexiayulechengma, described as a relative of the woman, said in a post. “The 8-month-old child was stillborn and had no heartbeat.”

The post has since been deleted and further posts on the account hidden from public view, but a hashtag spreading news of the report has been viewed hundreds of millions of times on the platform…

The hospital’s general manager was suspended and those in charge of the outpatient department and the medical department were dismissed, he added.

“On behalf of the municipal health department, I deeply apologize to this patient, and deeply apologize for the poor access to medical treatment,”  he said…

“Because of fear of this disease with very low mortality, a pregnant woman with severe bleeding was ignored,” one person posted on Weibo. “What is the logic?”

There is logic to this, obviously. It’s the cruel and inflexible logic which says all that matters is following the rules coming down from above.

It’s hard to overstate just how disturbing this is. There is evidence that pre-exists writing and civilization itself that primitive humans, even Neanderthals, cared deeply for their infants. This is a human tendency written into our nature over thousands of generations. And yet, not one person in this chain of army ants in Xi’an had the guts to step out of line and break the rules to save an innocent life or help a suffering pregnant woman. According to a video report from the South China Morning Post, the woman’s most recent COVID test had expired 4-hours earlier and that’s why the hospital wouldn’t help her.

You wouldn’t think this level of blind indifference was possible except perhaps from the dregs of society, people too damaged and cruel to have normal human reactions to normal human experiences. But under communist COVID lockdown it’s not only possible it’s required even from the people supposedly dedicated to saving lives at a hospital. Communism and the pervasive fear it creates has turned people into soulless psychopaths. 

And then on top of that some bureaucrat is going to offer an apology as if that will make up for a dead child. But of course he’s not offering the apology because he is independently ashamed of his actions. He’s offering the apology because the people above him are unhappy with the reactions online. In other words, it’s still just people acting like drones, following the same signals from above that created this situation in the first place. If those signals tell them to leave a pregnant woman outside until her baby dies, they’ll do that. If the superiors reverse course and tell them to offer a heartfelt apology, they’ll do that instead. Nothing human or individual enters into this closed loop. It takes random people on social media to point out that this behavior is insane and inhuman.

The story goes on to report this isn’t the only such case in Xi’an. Another woman claimed on social media that she spent hours trying to find a hospital to accept her father who was having chest pains. He was eventually admitted but later died thanks in part to the delay. One Weibo user quoted in this CNN report below summed it up this way, “COVID-19 might not kill you, but bureaucrats can.”