Lanzhou promises investigation after father blames son’s death on COVID-zero policy

Health authorities in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, Gansu province, have pledged to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a three-year-old boy after his father accused local lockdown enforcement workers of delaying medical help for the child when he was stricken with carbon monoxide poisoning.

The matter first came to public attention on November 1 when Lanzhou’s bureau of emergency management informed local residents that it had been notified of a gas leak incident at a household in the city’s Qilihe District, which it said had claimed the life of one person and made another one sick due to carbon monoxide poisoning.

The alert was followed up on Tuesday by a statement from Qilihe’s public security department, which wrote on Weibo that one of the victims was a child who already lost signs of life when police officers arrived at the scene around 1:43 p.m. The child was pronounced dead at a hospital later in the afternoon.

On Wednesday, more details about the child’s death emerged as news outlets reached out to his father, Tuo Shilei, letting him tell his side of the story. In an interview with Health Times, a paper run by the People’s Daily, Tuo revealed that symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning first appeared on his wife when she collapsed after inhaling gas fumes while cooking. Although Tuo’s wife’s status improved after he turned off the boiler and performed CPR on her, he soon found that their son had lost consciousness and suffered urinary incontinence during sleep.

But the child was still breathing at that point, he told Health Times. As shown in call records shared by Tuo with the newspaper, the father dialed 120 for first aid multiple times in the course of nearly an hour, but an ambulance never showed up.

According to an account posted to social media by Tuo, which has since been deleted, the father carried his son to the entrance of his community complex, but two lockdown enforcement officers blocked him at a COVID-19 checkpoint, citing his lack of a recent PCR test result as the reason. “My residential compound has been under lockdown and people here haven’t been tested for 10 days,” he wrote.

Losing patience, Tuo decided to crash through the barriers with his son, and a stranger hailed a taxi to take them to a hospital, where doctors’ efforts to save the child were unsuccessful. “My son could have been saved if he had arrived at the hospital sooner,” Tuo wrote.

He went on to reveal that after the passing of his son, a retired local official offered him 100,000 yuan ($13,700) in exchange for his silence. But he turned down the proposed deal, instead demanding accountability and an official explanation for his son’s death.

Although Tuo’s post was short-lived on the Chinese internet, screenshots of it have been making the rounds on social media, causing widespread anger and prompting calls for a thorough investigation into the case. As of Wednesday evening, a hashtag spurred by the news had been viewed 130 million times on Weibo, with many commenters accusing the anti-epidemic workers of delaying potentially life-saving treatment for the boy. “The father forever lost his son and I hope he gets the closure he needs in the end,” a person wrote, while another one asked, “Why does eliminating the virus seem more scary than the virus itself?”

Some Lanzhou residents also used the opportunity to call attention to the COVID situation in the city, which they said has been under partial lockdowns for months but rarely made national headlines. On Wednesday, Lanzhou recorded 51 non-symptomatic COVID cases out of its four million residents.

In response to the claims leveled by Tuo, a spokesperson for Lanzhou’s government department responsible for dispatching ambulances told Health Times that an investigation has been launched by a higher-level office. “What exactly happened will definitely be revealed one day,” the person said.

The incident in Lanzhou is the latest in a series of complaints about delayed or denied medical care for non-COVID illnesses under China’s strict pandemic-control measures, which — in some cases — have led to deadly consequences. In January 2022, when the 13 million residents of Xi’an were forbidden from leaving their homes amid virus flare-ups, a woman wrote on social media that her dad had died of cardiovascular disease after multiple hospitals refused to treat him, citing policies of not being allowed to admit patients from regions affected by the outrage. Her post followed reports that a woman suffered a miscarriage due to COVID restrictions, which resulted in the firing of medical chiefs at the hospital that turned her away. As a result of this incident, a senior Chinese official warned hospitals not to turn away patients.