With millions of Chinese still under strict restrictions thanks to Beijing’s strict zero-covid strategy, the deaths in the early hours of Sunday morning quickly became a lightning rod for criticism of the government. Only two people have died from Covid in Guizhou in the entire pandemic. “What proof do you have that someday you won’t be on that bus at night?” read a popular post on the Twitter-like site Weibo. The top-rated answer was: “Who said we’re not on that late night bus, we’re clearly all there. We’re all on this scary, dark bus.” The bus accident quickly became Weibo’s top trending topic on Sunday afternoon before suddenly disappearing from the top 50 trending topics. At least some widely shared and angry blogs on the matter were deleted from WeChat soon after they were posted, but some reports and comments initially remained, although many of the more critical ones were removed from Weibo. The accident occurred on a highway in Guizhou province when the vehicle carrying 47 people “fell on its side,” Sandu County police said in a statement on social media. Twenty people are being treated for injuries and have been sent to the scene in the remote Qiannan prefecture, according to police. Photos widely shared on social media on Sunday showed a gold-coloured passenger bus, its top completely crumpled, being towed by a truck. Another viral photo appeared to show the bus driving at night, with the driver and passengers wearing hazmat suits, which are still commonly worn in China to protect against Covid. The Guizhou government confirmed later on Sunday that the vehicle was “carrying people linked to the quarantine epidemic” from the provincial capital Guiyang and that the accident occurred around 2.40am. of Sunday. “At present, the rescue operations on the ground have been substantially completed, the treatment of the injured and the subsequent treatment of the deceased are being conducted in an orderly manner, and the causes of the accident are being investigated,” the local government said on social media. . It was not clear if the passengers were infected with Covid, had close contacts or lived in the same building as patients with the virus. The zero-Covid policy has often seen entire homes of thousands of people relocated to purpose-built quarantine facilities, sometimes hundreds of kilometers away. Guizhou’s Communist Party chief and the provincial governor “rushed” to Qian’an province to direct emergency response work, the local government said, adding that officials “expressed their deepest condolences to the victims.” “It is necessary to learn a lesson from the accident, to consider the quarantine and transfer of personnel linked to the epidemic and the hidden dangers in road safety… [and] decisively limit the occurrence of major accidents”, the announcement states. Guizhou recorded 712 new confirmed cases on Saturday, which made up about 70 percent of all new cases in China and was a big jump from 154 cases in the province the previous day, data from China’s national health commission showed on Sunday. Guiyang, the capital and home to 6 million people, was sealed off earlier in September. Local officials are under pressure to keep cases under control, especially now, ahead of the party’s congress in October.
