China’s northeastern Jilin Province, hit hard by a relentless new wave of COVID-19, has built six makeshift hospitals to try and counteract the quick rise in new cases and hospitalizations, local authorities said on March 12.
Five hospitals are in Jilin City, the most impacted area, and one has been built in the capital of Changchun, said Zhang Li, deputy director of Jilin’s provincial health commission. As of March 12, authorities said they were urgently building a fourth hospital.
Along with seven medical institutions allocated to critical patients, there are also over 20,000 beds available for COVID patients in the province. In addition, authorities said that three facilities were ready for use as of March 12.
On March 14, state-run media reported 3,507 new locally transmitted cases, of which 3,076 were reported to have originated in Jilin Province, the National Health Commission said. However, as the Chinese regime has been known to conceal accurate statistics, considerable doubt has been cast as to the veracity of these numbers.
Local authorities have also conducted mass testing amongst thousands of residents in an effort to curb further spread of the virus. However, as the Chinese regime has been known to conceal real considerable doubt has been cast as to the veracity of statistics released by the Chinese regime.
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Jilin’s health commission official Zhang Yan was quoted as saying: “The emergency response mechanism in some areas is not robust enough, there is insufficient understanding of the characteristics of the Omicron variant and our response has therefore been inaccurate.”
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6000 students locked inside school campus
Particularly hard hit was Jilin College of Agricultural Science and Technology, with a large number of confirmed cases amongst faculty and students.
Due to the school’s improper handling and prevention of this new spread, more than 6000 students were placed into a mandatory lockdown within the school’s dorms. As a result of this and because the real situation of the outbreak was being leaked, the school’s head of staff Zhang Lifeng was removed from office on March 10.
A male student enrolled at Jilin college told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times on March 11 that a positive case was first discovered in the school around March 3 and then began to spread. “I only learned that many students in the 9th Building were infected at that time. Other dorms were not that widespread,” the student said.
Another student said, “I thought that the school had transferred all students who tested positive elsewhere. I didn’t expect that they would transfer students who tested negative instead. They left all the positive ones in the 9th Building, which became the source of the virus,” he said, adding that no one knows how many people were infected because the school strictly concealed the list of infected people until the situation became out of control.
A netizen by the username of @Banbijiangshan wrote on Twitter that, “On March 9, the most seriously infected was the 9th Building, in which the most severe cases were on the 4th and 5th floors. Many students had a fever and tested positive but no one took care of them. They were only given some pain killers and told to deal with it by themselves.”
Banbijiangshan was one of the students who lived on the 1st and 3rd floors of the school dorms. He said students who tested negative remained living with those who had tested positive and all shared the same space.
“No quarantine action was taken,” he said.
Parents receive SOS letters from confined students
Another netizen by the username of @Dongmei wrote that some parents of locked down students were receiving SOS letters urging them to send help. “A student sent an open letter begging for help, saying, “We’ve handed over our lives to the [Chinese Communist Party], but how is that turning out?”
Jilin mayor fired
On March 12, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) published a notice announcing that Jilin City mayor Wang Lu was to be removed from his post as deputy secretary of the Jilin Municipal Party Committee as well as the city’s mayor.
The decision came after over 800 new confirmed cases were reported in Jilin Province over the past week.
Under the CCP’s “Zero-COVID” policy, local authorities have stringently upheld orders which have included disinfection theatrics, draconian lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions. In some cases, the heavy-handed measures have resulted in violence and tragedy as residents are sometimes beaten if they are found to be breaking quarantine.
Authorities in Jilin Province have also announced a complete lockdown in the residential zones of Siping and Dunhua and said all restaurants, schools, shopping malls, and businesses would be closed until further notice.
In its drive to completely eradicate the pandemic from China, the CCP has placed entire cities into lockdowns for weeks on end, sometimes after only a handful of cases are detected. In December 2021, authorities placed the northwestern city of Xi’an, home to roughly 13 million, into a strict lockdown lasting over three weeks. Other metropolis’ such as Shenzhen, Xiamen and Shanghai have also been placed into partial lockdowns in recent weeks, resulting in severe impacts to the national economy as well as to the mental health and social life of residents in China.
