36-Year-Old Chinese Financial Journalist Dies Four Days After Falling Ill With Fever

Patients on stretchers are seen at Tongren hospital in Shanghai on Jan. 3, 2023. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Luo Qi, a well-known journalist, died after an illness in December of last year, her mother said in a statement.

The death of Ms. Luo, 36, came as an outbreak of pneumonia struck a large number of Chinese, including children, in recent months, overwhelming hospitals and recalling memories of COVID outbreaks.

In her last social media post, Ms. Luo said her smart ring alerted her that she had a fever.

“What a surprise!” she wrote on WeChat, accompanied by a screenshot from Oura Ring, a tiny health-tracking device, showing that her body temperature was 1.7 degrees higher than the normal range.

But four days later, Ms. Luo’s mother posted an obituary on Chinese social media, stating that Ms. Luo died of severe pneumonia on Dec. 24 after medical efforts failed to rescue her.

Suspicion

Her death sparked intense discussion on China’s social media. One of the hashtags, Financial Media Person Luo Qi Passed Away, had nearly 5 million views on China’s microblogging platform Weibo on Dec. 26.

Beneath a Dec. 25 Hong Kong media report on Ms. Luo’s death, the most-liked comment was skepticism over her mother’s accounts of her cause, suggesting that she died of COVID pneumonia instead of regular pneumonia.

Interviews with people in Ms. Luo’s hometown in Wanzai County in southern China also reflected the skepticism. A local funeral service owner told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times that Ms. Luo died of COVID-19 infection. The woman, who asked to speak anonymously out of fear of reprisal, said she learned the information from Ms. Luo’s friends and classmates, who bought funeral supplies in her store.

“I heard that she didn’t pay much attention when she noticed she had a fever, but by the time she got to the hospital, there was no cure. The hospital’s diagnosis result was COVID-19,” she said.

Ms. Luo’s family can’t be reached for comment due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Rising Infection and Distrust

China experienced a sharp rise in respiratory illnesses, mostly among children, in October 2022. By November of last year, the skyrocketed cases put the country’s medical system under strain, with domestic media reports showing that long lines had formed at pediatric hospitals. Some parents reported that they waited up to eight hours to get their children to see a doctor.

The chaotic scenes in medical facilities across the nation revoked the memory of the early days of the pandemic, when COVID-19 emerged as a strange new virus in China, making thousands of residents in the central Chinese city of Wuhan fall ill with fever and pneumonia symptoms.

The rise in respiratory illnesses attracted global attention on Nov. 22, 2023, when the World Health Organization requested Beijing for detailed data, noting that the media and ProMed, a public health surveillance system run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, reported clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia among children in Beijing and Liaoning Province.

Health authorities in China later responded that no “unusual or new pathogens” being detected, attributing the rise uptick in respiratory illnesses to a combination of known germs, most prominently influenza.

Yet Beijing’s explanation didn’t quell the concerns of its neighbors. Taiwan advised the very young and others with poor immunity to avoid travel to China.

There was also distrust within the country. Many speculated that the cause of the surge in cases was the mycoplasma pneumonia claimed by the authorities, but mutated strains of COVID-19.

Sources have told The Epoch Times that the regime instructed to downplay the report of the pediatric pneumonia outbreak, avoiding referring to the outbreak as “COVID-19.”

Luo Qi

According to media reports, Ms. Luo was a seasoned financial reporter who had worked for China Business Network, and later served as a regional manager of SINA Finance in Hong Kong. In 2021, she joined the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, specializing in global listing services. Very recently, she worked for the startup platform WHub and the Internet company RSS3 before she passed away.

Current affairs commentator Li Linyi told The Epoch Times on Dec. 29 that the HKEX has become increasingly under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its inception as a merger of several exchanges. For example, the chairman of the HKEX, Laura M Cha, was once the vice-chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) before returning to Hong Kong and becoming the chairman of HKEX.

“In addition, the HKEX also helps the CCP raise funds internationally, which is one of its key responsibilities,” Mr. Li said.

“The things that the HKEX does, such as the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, and the Bond Connect, are all means for the CCP to obtain money through Hong Kong,” he explained, “Recently, when the performance of China’s stock market was extremely poor, with stock indexes hitting historic lows, it was said that through mechanisms like the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, the HKEX channels a portion of Hong Kong’s stock market funds to Mainland China to bolster its stock market.”

Deaths Among CCP Celebrities Rise

Over the past two years of the COVID pandemic, a large number of Communist Party officials have passed away. That also includes the country’s top scientists, scholars, and celebrities tied to the Party. While most of their obituaries didn’t specify the reason for their deaths, the uptick in death among the Party elites, who enjoyed better medical care than the public, still drew outside observers’ attention.

For Mr. Li, these deaths are a “warning bell” to the world.

“These people who are close to the CCP have been dying in great numbers lately. Why is that so? This is a question that many Chinese cannot avoid.”