HONG KONG—A fatal bus crash in southwestern China that killed 27 people being transferred to a quarantine facility has reignited public anger about the toll of strict anti-Covid measures meant to protect the Chinese public.
The bus overturned on a highway in the early hours Sunday in the southwestern province of Guizhou while carrying passengers to a quarantine facility, state-backed media outlets including the Beijing News reported. The accident killed 27 people and injured 20 others, according to local police. A social-media account managed by China’s Ministry of Transport said the accident occurred around 2:40 a.m. before the post was deleted.
The deadly accident raised fresh questions about the human toll of China’s zero-tolerance campaign, which seeks to crush even small Covid outbreaks by locking residents in their homes and sending close contacts of infected patients to centralized quarantine facilities. Many Chinese citizens are looking for signs of a change in policy as a closely watched Communist Party conclave approaches next month.
Beijing’s strict Covid-prevention measures have stoked increasing public frustration in recent weeks as the human and economic toll mounts nearly three years into the pandemic. Authorities this year have locked down large swaths of the country for weeks and even months at a time, most notably Shanghai—a city of 25 million people that is China’s most prosperous city—for two months in the spring.
On Monday, internet users took to China’s social-media platforms to express anger and lament the hopelessness of the Guizhou bus passengers, who had been caught in what many saw as the apparent arbitrariness of authorities’ measures. It wasn’t clear whether the passengers being transported had contracted the virus, or had merely been close contacts of patients.
The fact that the bus was traveling around 2:40 a.m. when it overturned led many on social media to speculate that the passengers were being transferred at that time in order to draw less attention. Many asked what urgent matter prompted authorities to bus people from their homes at that hour. China passed a law in 2018 banning all long-distance road passenger transportation between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., citing safety concerns.
A spokesperson at China’s Ministry of Transport referred questions to Guizhou provincial authorities, who declined to answer questions, pointing instead to official state media reports about the accident.
On Sunday,
Lin Gang,
the vice mayor of Guizhou’s capital, Guiyang, bowed in apology, expressing “deep sorrow and remorse” for the deaths.
On China’s social-media platforms, the gesture was greeted by cynicism. “An apology will not bring the deceased back to life,” read one widely shared post, which said that the accident had cost the trust of society.
“This shouldn’t have happened. Had they been quarantined at home, they wouldn’t have lost their lives,” read another post. “The virus didn’t take their lives, but they still aren’t coming back,” added another. “They didn’t die from Covid, they died on the way to quarantine. Such a pity.”
One of the most popular comments on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform—“How do you know that you won’t be on that early morning bus one day?”—attracted thousands of likes before it was deleted, only to be reproduced by other social media users.
One phrase was echoed by many social users: “Zero deaths from Covid, 27 deaths from Covid measures.”
The topic appeared to be subjected to some degree of censorship on China’s internet. Though a hashtag related to the accident had attracted more than 100 million views, the topic didn’t appear on Weibo’s list of trending topics. On many popular posts, the comments function had been blocked.
China’s policy of transferring close contacts of infected patients to centralized quarantine facilities, often located far from urban centers, has been controversial since it was first implemented. In March 2020, a quarantine hotel in the southeastern Chinese city of Quanzhou collapsed, killing 29 close contacts of infected patients.
The practice became more common as the more easily transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus exploded in late 2021. When Omicron began spreading in the northwestern Chinese city of Xi’an in December, local authorities did exactly that in a bid to bring community transmission to zero.
The policy sparked widespread anger when it was applied widely during Shanghai’s lockdown in the spring, forcing tens of thousands of people, including infants and the elderly, into quarantine facilities.
In the case of Guizhou, the province of nearly 40 million people had recorded roughly 2,600 confirmed Covid cases, including asymptomatic infections, since the beginning of the month.
Guiyang has been transferring close contacts of Covid patients to quarantine facilities, according to its official social-media account, and by Saturday, the province had transferred more than 7,000 people and was transferring another 2,900, it said. On Sunday night, social media posts showed that more people were being informed around midnight that they would be transferred to quarantine facilities.
On Sunday, local authorities in Guiyang published eight cases in which community officials and civil service workers had “irresponsibly and incorrectly carried out their duties”—for instance, by failing to conduct nucleic acid tests on time.
On Monday, Guiyang authorities said they had achieved zero community transmission for three straight days, declaring that the risk of transmission “has been effectively stemmed.”
People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, reported Monday that three local officials would be suspended from their posts for the deadly accident while the provincial government investigates the crash.
On Sept. 1, authorities in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, which neighbors Guizhou, ordered its 21 million citizens to remain at home and submit to citywide Covid-19 tests after 700 cases were detected during the previous week.
A week later, when a magnitude 6.8 earthquake rocked the region, killing nearly 100 people, some quarantined residents were barred from fleeing by Covid-prevention staff, sparking another round of soul-searching on China’s internet about the collateral damage of strict adherence to Covid rules.
On Monday, Chengdu formally lifted its lockdown after nearly three weeks, declaring the outbreak effectively controlled.
—Qianwei Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Cao Li at li.cao@wsj,com
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