Shanghai morgue workers discover man alive in body bag

A video shows the moment workers in a Chinese city hit hard by Covid-19 discover a body being transported to the morgue is not dead.

A video shows the moment workers in a Chinese city hit hard by Covid-19 discover a body being transported to the morgue is not dead.

The footage, from the financial centre of Shanghai, showed three workers loading a body into the back of a car for transport.

At one point, one of the men unzips the yellow body bag to discover a man in his 70s believed to have died from Covid-19 was, in fact, alive.

Beijing Bureau Chief for NBC News, Eunice Yoon, shared the news on social media on Tuesday.

“‘He’s alive!’,” she wrote. “A morgue worker explains while taking an elderly man mistaken for dead in a body bag back to a nursing facility in Shanghai. The video shocked China as a sign of how overwhelmed the medical care system has become amid the country’s widening Covid-19 crisis.”

#WATCH: The horrifying moment Shanghai morgue workers realise the corpse they are transporting is still alive. #9Newspic.twitter.com/NsKxywNVmL

— 9News Queensland (@9NewsQueensland) May 3, 2022

A care centre for elderly patients which sent the man off to the mortuary has reportedly apologised for the incident which comes as global attention turns to the way China approaches its zero-covid strategy.

It comes as Shanghai residents claim they are being forced onto buses and taken hundreds of kilometres away from Shanghai to makeshift quarantine centres.

Most of Shanghai’s 25 million residents have been confined to their homes for weeks as the city battles a major Covid outbreak — its largest since the pandemic started in China in late 2019.

Hundreds of thousands of virus-positive people have been taken to makeshift facilities as China does not allow them to quarantine at home.

But some residents who tested negative told AFP that they were also forced out of their homes and taken to camps outside the city, some hundreds of kilometres away.

“The police told us that there were too many positive cases in our compound and if we carried on living here, we’d all become infected,” resident Lucy told AFP, using only her first name for privacy reasons.

“We had no choice.” She said the virus-negative group were sent to a quarantine site containing hundreds of single-room prefab cabins in neighbouring Anhui province, 400 kilometres away, and that it was not initially clear where they going.

Policemen at a check point on a street during a Covid-19 lockdown in the Jing'an district in Shanghai on May 2, 2022 Picture: Hector Retamal/AFP

Shanghai on Monday was under a patchwork of different restrictions as new virus cases dropped to around 7000, with 32 new deaths.

City authorities have imposed a three-tiered system of “freedoms”, although stringent local enforcement appeared to still restrict the majority of residents to within compounds or neighbourhoods.

China’s relentless pursuit of a policy to keep Covid-19 cases as low as possible has left many Shanghai residents chafing under the tight curbs.

Officials in the economic hub are likely under more pressure than elsewhere to achieve “zero-Covid at the community level” — meaning no transmission outside quarantine centres — according to Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

“When they face strong pressure from above to achieve zero-Covid targets, these heavy-handed, excessive measures become more likely.”

“Moving negative people could be considered a pre-emptive strategy, with the expectation that more positive cases may be found if they stay there,” Huang added.

A policeman wearing personal protective equipment walks on a street in Shanghai on May 1, 2022. Picture: Hector Retamal/AFP

Chinese officials are routinely sacked after virus outbreaks for perceived failures in Covid control.

Tens of thousands of close contacts of virus cases have been quarantined in neighbouring provinces, according to official news agency Xinhua.

But there has been no mention in official media of the relocation of negative cases.

Shanghai authorities have faced wide criticism after they initially announced phased four-day lockdowns in different parts of the city that were not then lifted.

Tall metal barriers were erected around some locked-down compounds in recent days, as part of measures described as a “hard lockdown”.

— with AFP