China’s Locked-Down City Thrown Into Chaos After Covid App Crash

(Bloomberg) -- China's Covid-19 health code system that strictly governs people's movements crashed in Xi'an this week, worsening conditions in the locked-down city where the country's worst outbreak since Wuhan has been unfolding.

The crash has complicated efforts to weed out cases through mass testing, created hurdles for people seeking care at hospitals and led to the suspension of a top official, the latest among a slew of bureaucrats to be punished as Beijing fumes over the situation.

Liu Jun, head of Xi'an's big-data bureau, was temporarily dismissed over performance failures, the municipal Communist Party Committee said in a statement. While the committee didn't explicitly lay out the reason behind its decision, it came after Xi'an's health code system -- which is under Liu's purview and tracks individuals' movements and vaccination status -- broke down on Tuesday.

The system crash meant that locals were unable to access their Covid infection status after Xi'an embarked on a new widespread round of nucleic acid tests, according to a media report. The provincial government said in a statement later that the system was temporarily paralyzed due to overwhelming traffic, and being fixed. It had also experienced technical issues in December.

People must show their health codes -- which prove that they tested negative for Covid -- to enter hospitals.

The provincial women's federation is investigating reports that a pregnant woman in Xi'an lost her baby after being refused entry to a hospital on New Year's Day because she couldn't show she was infection-free via the health code app, media portal iFeng.com reported. A video posted Tuesday showing what appeared to be a woman bleeding on the sidewalk outside a hospital in Xi'an's Gaoxin district was trending on Weibo.

Similar complaints and criticisms were seen elsewhere on Chinese social media as patients failed to get timely treatment at hospitals already overwhelmed by the virus.

With more than 1,700 cases, the virus situation in Xi'an has triggered shortages of food and medical care amid a lockdown that has banned its more than 13 million residents from leaving their homes without a special reason. The strict measures -- some of the toughest in the world -- come as Chinese authorities race to curtail the country's Covid outbreak ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics next month, and have led to increasingly vocal frustration among locals.

A Dozen Days of Lockdown Spurs Angst in Chinese City of Xi'an

China is one of the only places left practicing a zero-tolerance Covid strategy, which involves ever-escalating measures to bring infections down to zero. While the Xi'an outbreak is of the delta variant, the more-transmissible omicron strain now roiling the world will challenge the approach even further. Mainland China has not yet reported any community spread of omicron.

Two other local officials, including the deputy mayor, were removed this week over their handling of the outbreak.

“The Xi'an outbreak is the most severe after the Wuhan lockdown,” Zeng Guang, one of China's top Covid-19 advisers and former chief scientist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was quoted as saying by a local newspaper Tuesday. “We hope Xi'an can create a new experience in containing an outbreak in the short-term, after losing control at the very initial stage.”

With assistance from Bloomberg