Shanghai: Nursing Home Resident Sent to Morgue While Still Alive

Staff at a Shanghai nursing home transported one of the facility’s residents to a city-run morgue on Sunday while he was still alive in an incident partly captured on eyewitness video, China’s Caixin Global media group reported on Monday.

“In a viral video on Sunday [May 1], a body can be seen being retrieved from a funeral home car parked at the entrance of Shanghai Xinchangzheng Welfare Hospital, a local senior nursing home,” Caixin Global relayed on May 2. “A voiceover from what appears to be a witness can be heard saying that funeral home staff returned the senior resident to the nursing home, as the elderly person was found to be still alive.”

The apparent mixup took place in Shanghai’s Putuo district on May 1. The Shanghai senior citizen at the center of the debacle was reported on May 2 as having been “admitted to a hospital” by China’s state-run eastday.com.

Putuo district’s Communist Party-run Civil Affairs Bureau confirmed the incident on May 2 and said it had launched a probe into the actions that led to the near-fatal mistake. The bureau confirmed later on May 2 that China’s ruling Communist Party reprimanded five Putuo district-level officials and a Shanghai-based medical doctor for their contributions to the grave error.

China’s Communist Party-backed Global Times relayed the bureau’s punishments on Monday, writing:

Zhang Jiandong, head of the district’s civil affairs bureau, was put on record according to the Party discipline and will accept further investigation.

Huang Yaohong, deputy head of the bureau, Liu Yinghua, head of the bureau’s elderly care service section, and Wu Youcheng, head of the social career development office in Changzheng town, were removed from their positions, put on record and will be further investigated. … Ge Fang, head of the welfare house was also sacked and put on record.

Authorities also revoked the profession certificate of an involved doctor surnamed Tian, who is also under investigation.

The newspaper added that Putuo’s Civil Affairs Bureau further launched “administrative punishment procedures” against the Shanghai nursing home responsible for the mishap as of May 2.

Shanghai’s roughly 26 million residents have been under strict stay-at-home orders since at least March 28. China’s ruling Communist Party imposed a city-wide lockdown on Shanghai in an effort to contain the city’s most recent epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus. The movement restrictions have caused major hardships for the financial hub’s populace, including dire food shortages and limited access to urgent medical care.

“Multiple nursing homes in Shanghai have reported mass contagions amid this wave of outbreak. Among the Covid [Chinese coronavirus] death cases, many were elderly people with underlying health conditions,” Caixin Global observed on May 2.