by Ilana Freedman, America Outloud:

It was an apartment fire in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang province in northwest China, that started it. The firemen came, but it took them three hours to put the fire out because the doors to the building that would have allowed them access to the fire were either blocked off or locked. This was due, witnesses said, to the zero COVID policies of the Chinese government. 

Ten people died in that fire, including Qemernisa Abdurahman, an Uyghur woman, and her four children, who, according to an NPR report, had already endured more than 100 days in lockdown. Her apartment caught fire, and they could not escape. For her, this was the ultimate tragedy in an already tragic life. Her husband and oldest son had been detained in 2017 when the state rounded up hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, an ethnic, primarily Muslim, Turkic minority, whom the CCP has targeted as a part of their campaign to reduce their numbers and place as many as a million Uyghurs in concentration camps. After his arrest, the woman never heard from either of them again.