Dozens of migrant workers constructing makeshift hospitals in China’s Jilin Province were infected with COVID-19 due to the harsh living environment and lack of protection.
These workers have been quarantined in those makeshift hospitals, all the while having not received payment for their labor, but forced to pay for quarantine.
Migrant Workers
Changchun and Jilin cities in northeastern China’s Jilin Province have experienced bad COVID-19 outbreaks in March. On March 12, a construction company in Harbin, the capital of neighboring Heilongjiang Province, sent nearly 1,000 workers to Jilin to build the makeshift hospitals.“293 migrant workers have come back to Harbin in recent days, and some of them were diagnosed with COVID-19. All these 293 workers are under centralized medical observation,” manager of the construction company Tang Jiaru told state-run Harbin Daily on March 26. “[The other about 700 workers] are staying in the city where they constructed the makeshift hospitals.”
Wang was one of the stranded workers. He worked together with over 300 migrant workers at Xinbei community in Chuanying district of Jilin city and for what would be a hard and underresourced word.
Wang and his peers arrived at the makeshift hospital’s construction field on March 14 to find out that they weren’t provided rooms to sleep but a drafty tent.
“It’s a temporary tent without water, electricity, or heat. It was very cold to live inside,” Wang said.
Jilin city is still cold in March and average temperatures of around 20°F at night and 33°F at noon.
On the second day, the workers decided to sleep in a shopping mall under renovation in Changyi district of the city. The over 300 workers lived there together. Without heating, the shopping mall was still cold but better than the tent.
Wang complained that the local authorities regime didn’t supply them with enough food, and ordered them to work for 36 hours continually before being allowed a 12 hour break. Another 36 hour shift then awaited them.
“We didn’t rest and were tired, which might have caused our immune system to become weak. On March 20, some of the workers started to feel sick,” Wang said. “Two of us tested positive for COVID-19 that day.”
However, neither the construction company nor the city regime took any action. The over 300 workers had to sleep together in the shopping mall for another night. On March 21, some of the workers refused to work again and protested on a street close to the shopping mall.
By this time, the workers had finished the construction of the makeshift hospital at Xinbei community, and the construction company planned to move them to Changchun to build another makeshift hospital.
“Many of us were afraid of being infected with the virus. We didn’t want to work any more and we wanted to go home,” Wang said.
Becoming Infected
More and more workers then started to cough and experience fever. The regime then moved all the workers out of the shopping mall into a nearby hotel.“Three workers shared one empty room. They didn’t give us a bed nor cover,” Wang said. “We weren’t allowed to leave the hotel for two days and one night. Many of us tested positive [for COVID-19] in there.”
Eventually, Wang and another 160 workers who tested negative for the virus were moved to a hotel in Shulan county where they could finally sleep on a bed. But on March 25, they were moved to a makeshift hospital in Longtan district because the majority of them tested positive.
“I haven’t received today’s test result. I guess all of us have been infected with COVID-19,” Wang said on March 26. On that day, he started to have symptoms.
The medical staff of the makeshift hospital “gave me some drugs this morning. That’s all. I feel weak now and the lunch was too small to fill my stomach,” Wang said. “We kept on asking for the salaries. The construction company didn’t respond. We are worried about the cost of the quarantine and treatment.”
Liu is another migrant worker from Harbin who works for the same construction company as Wang, but at a different construction site.
On March 26, Liu was treated at a makeshift hospital in the Chuanying district of Jilin city after being diagnosed with COVID-19 few days earlier. He traveled to the city for employment with another 18 colleagues.
“All of us, 19 workers, were diagnosed. In this makeshift hospital, 200 to 300 patients are living in the same room. The hospital is full,” Liu told the Chinese-language Epoch Times. He said that he didn’t know the identities of the other patients in the hospital.
Liu said that the hospital was inside a hall, with patients sleeping on bunk beds. He said that Jilin city officials didn’t allow them to post anything online about their experience or talk to the media.
“The officials told us that we will face criminal charges if we dare expose our situation on social media platforms,” Liu said.
