China Tells Hospitals to Take Patients After Lockdown Outcry Over Woman’s Miscarriage

(Bloomberg) -- China has told hospitals they must accept all patients after strict Covid prevention measures were blamed for a miscarriage in Xi’an, a central city of 13 million people that has been locked down for two weeks.

Medical facilities across the world’s No. 2 economy “must not turn away patients under any excuse” and should immediately admit people with severe conditions regardless of whether they have a negative test, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said at a meeting on Thursday with officials in Xi’an.

Sun, the only woman on the ruling Communist Party’s 25-member Politburo, said districts in all cities should have designated hospitals to receive patients and residential communities must organize transport, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Sun’s orders are an attempt to clear up confusion troubling officials across China, who must balance the central government’s Covid-zero strategy with meeting the needs of the public. Adding to the pressure on officialdom is Beijing’s desire for no virus flareups before the Winter Olympics start Feb. 4 and a twice-a-decade party congress in the fall that is expected to hand President Xi Jinping another term in office. 

The nation is dealing with a new spate of cases even as they drop off in Xi’an. Shenzhen, a tech center in the south, has discouraged people from leaving the city after announcing two fresh infections, and three asymptomatic infections were found in the financial hub of Shanghai.

China Sees Covid Cases Across Country, Even After Xi’an’s Drop

People across China were angered by the story of a pregnant woman who lost her baby outside a hospital in Xi’an that denied her entry due to Covid controls, an incident that led to the firing of two hospital department heads. 

Xi’an residents have been sharing stories about other miscarriages and even deaths on the Twitter-like Weibo service in recent days. One woman described in detail how she drove for hours looking for a hospital that would treat her father who had a heart attack and wound up dying.

“Clearly the pressure from above is very high,” said Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “That’s going to provide these strong incentives for local leaders to implement the approach to the extreme in order to get things done.”

Officials around the country will “do all they can by all means and at all costs to make sure cases reset to zero before the Winter Olympics,” Huang said.

On Wednesday, Micron Technology Inc. chief financial officer David Zinsner said that while a plant in Xi’an has been operating at reduced capacity since Dec. 23, it’s expected to get back to normal this month as Covid cases fall.

The disruption would not have a material impact on revenues for the first quarter, he said.

The U.S. company said last month that output of some computer memory would be hit by the city’s closure, and rival Samsung Electronics Co. made a similar announcement. The two firms are among the largest makers of chips that provide storage and short-term memory in everything from smartphones to supercomputers.

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With assistance from Bloomberg