CORPSING

Watch: Shanghai Senior Driven to Morgue in Body Bag Turns Out to Be Alive

Five officials were punished and a doctor had their license revoked in the wake of the incident.

A handful of Shanghai officials have been punished this week after an elderly nursing home resident was mistaken as dead, placed in a body bag, and taken to a morgue before the blunder was realized. A video widely circulated on Chinese social media shows several workers, decked out in full protective gear, recoil as they pull a yellow body bag from a hearse and unzip it. “Alive! Did you see that? Alive!” one of them says, according to a translation by The Guardian. “Do not cover him again,” the other orders. A voice speaking over footage shot from a different angle can be heard saying, according to a translation by CBS News, “This nursing home messed up… Irresponsible. Really irresponsible.” The Shanghai Supervisory Commission and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection responded to the incident on Monday, saying that five officials, including the director of the nursing home and a doctor, had been punished over the mistake. The Putuo district government confirmed the incident and said the elderly patient had been transferred to a local hospital, where he was said to be in stable condition. One commenter on social media pointed to the video as a sign of the “chaos” in Shanghai, where millions of residents were still under strict coronavirus-related lockdown orders on Tuesday.