China’s Zero-COVID Rules Stop Citizens From Evacuating During Earthquake

The strict enforcement of China‘s zero-tolerance COVID-19 policy left some residents stranded in their buildings and gated communities as they sought shelter during an earthquake Monday, social media images showed.

As the temblor struck China’s southwestern province of Sichuan at just before 1 p.m. local time, residents of the provincial capital, Chengdu, descended from their high-rise apartments and headed for open ground. But many found the exits locked or blocked by community health workers, who urged them to remain indoors.

Just hours earlier, the city had extended mandatory quarantine measures for the majority of its 21 million residents by three more days to help curb a surge in coronavirus cases. Members of the public were to undergo three more rounds of COVID testing through Wednesday, September 7, health officials ordered.

The quake, which Chinese monitors measured at magnitude 6.8, hit the county of Luding in southwest Sichuan. The death toll had risen to 66 as of 2 p.m. on Tuesday, China’s Xinhua news service reported. Several hundred more were injured or unaccounted for.

On Douyin, the original Chinese version of TikTok, cellphone video showed a group of neighbors, including young children and pets, standing together in the lobby of one building, which they discovered had been chained shut from the outside as they tried to escape.

In another clip, an elderly man was seen berating a health worker from behind the locked gate of his residential compound. “Hurry up and open the door! There’s an earthquake!” he shouted. “The earthquake is already over” was the response.

In the first video, top comments liked 40,000 and 22,000 times, respectively, questioned the inflexible COVID regulations at a time of emergency.

“It’s absolutely wrong to lock the entrance. Fire escapes must be kept open!” the first comment said. “Sealing the entrance like this could get everyone killed during a large earthquake. More than half would otherwise be able to escape,” the second comment said.

A third comment, liked nearly 10,000 times at the time of this writing, asked: “Isn’t this too much? The epidemic might not [kill] people, but a large earthquake definitely will.”

Discussions about priorities during emergency situations were trending on Chinese social media on Tuesday. A screenshot from the instant messaging and networking app WeChat, whose authenticity Newsweek couldn’t independently confirm, appeared to show a building manager ordering a resident chat group not to run.

Later, in a statement on its official WeChat account, Chengdu’s health authority said that “safeguarding of the lives of the public should be prioritized in the event of an earthquake, fire, flood and other disasters.”

There was no indication that any of the earthquake victims died as a result of the pandemic control measures.

Over the weekend, a report by Chinese news site Caixin said a record 65 million people in 33 cities were now living under some form of COVID lockdown in China.

Under the central government’s “dynamic zero-COVID” policy, a single positive case of the virus—symptomatic or not—can shut an entire residential block, office or shopping mall. Residents ordered to isolate are forbidden to leave their homes under the threat of punishment, a situation that has led to protests in some major cities as well as online.

The stringent policy has hit sections of the economy. In addition, Chinese officials have sparred with the World Health Organization, which considers Beijing’s approach unsustainable.

Observers describe the policy as part of the Chinese government’s attempt to maintain social stability. Officials in Beijing also may fear the political and public health consequences of allowing the virus to spread through the country’s sizable elderly population, which remains at risk of more serious symptoms because of the lower efficacy of Chinese-made vaccines.

Beijing has signaled its intention to maintain the zero COVID policy until the end of the year, if not longer.