The harsh measures of the Chinese communist regime’s zero COVID policy continue to cause suffering for the country’s citizens. Recently, a mother and her daughter in Xuchang City, Henan Province, had to spend the night outdoors in the snow as the checkpoint staff wouldn’t allow them to return home, despite their negative test results.
On Chinese social media last Sunday, a woman surnamed Dong uploaded a video showing her and her high school daughter’s plight on a cold winter night, which caused an uproar on the internet.
She complained in the video that on the evening of Jan. 22, when her daughter returned home from school with negative COVID-19 tests results, the neighborhood epidemic prevention checkpoint stopped her from entering. The staff refused Dong’s offer to keep her whole family in self-quarantine at home in exchange for letting her daughter come home.
Dong said that her daughter’s teacher told the students they had passed 18 rounds of nucleic acid tests, all of which were negative. The children could go home for the holidays. Her daughter had both a nucleic acid test certificate and a pass issued by her school. But the staff at her neighborhood checkpoint said that the daughter was not allowed to enter because where they live is a high-risk area. It was after 6 p.m. by then, and they had been negotiating with staff back and forth, but were still not allowed to enter their residential complex.
The mother and daughter then walked to their relatives, but were blocked at the checkpoint there as well, and had no choice but to return to their own neighborhood.
Dong described the situation, “It was snowing and freezing cold. Later, a bystander suggested ‘see if your relatives or friends live in a low-risk area, and send your daughter there.'” She and her daughter walked from the city to her grandmother’s house in the suburbs. But the checkpoint there didn’t allow them to go in either, so she and her daughter went back to the checkpoint in the city.
Dong and her daughter walked from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. while she dialed emergency number 110. The police on the phone told the checkpoint staff to let them go back home first and then put a seal on their door, but the staff did not agree to it. Then she called Yuzhou City (under Xuchang City) Epidemic Prevention and Control Command Center, but still had no resolution, by then it was 2 a.m.
Dong said to the checkpoint staff, “Can you let us go home first, then you can put a seal on our door. If we need to go to the isolation center for centralized isolation, even if it is at our own expense, we are willing. But the staff said ‘that is not possible, you have to contact the school.’ I called the teacher, but there was no answer.”
Dong choked on tears many times as she recounted what happened. She said, “There was no other way, so I stood outside with my daughter until 5 a.m. The child said, ‘Mom, I’m very cold, can you let me rest?’ I went over and said to the checkpoint staff that I wanted to get my car out and let the child sit in the car for a rest, he said that was okay.”
Dong said: “We stood in the wind and snow all night. I thought if every lesson has to be paid with the price of a human life, isn’t it too heavy. In such a harsh environment, if anything happened to my daughter, it would be the worst result that no one wants to see. They are the law enforcers, they can’t be accommodating, but shouldn’t the law put people first? ”
At 10 a.m. on Jan. 23, Dong contacted her daughter’s school again. Afterwards, the school sent a car to take her daughter back to school to stay there.
Mainland netizens criticized how the authorities treated the mother and daughter: “The epidemic is not scary, what is scary is people’s hearts.” “I can’t go back to my own home to quarantine at home, what kind of logic is that?” “Does it have to take some lives for them to change?”
