Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
The doors welded (or more commonly locked and bolted) shut were real. Reportedly this was all due to overzealous local officials rather than due to central CCP policy, but central CCP policy included "sending Covid-positive people to massive quarantine camps, forcibly if necessary", and it looks like they didn't back off on the camps or denounce the local paranoia until after protests in 2022, so I doubt they actually opposed the craziness. I also don't think it was deliberate propaganda, but "if only the emperor knew" has been a popular sentiment for hierarchical governments to passively exploit for millennia - you can get all the repression you want but without all the blowback you don't want, if you just let overzealous underlings do it for you and then don't interfere until or unless they go way too far.
The "dropping dead in the streets" videos I remember (and found again in a search), but I'm not sure they need addressing. There are a lot of things that can lead to someone fainting. My wife collapsed in the grocery store once just by pushing herself too hard near our first baby's due date, and a country full of old people trying to push themselves past the "996 working hour system" is likely to take a few similar casualties that you'd similarly never hear about ... except in the context of an uncertain new virus. It doesn't take a propagandist for a paranoid official to decide "just be safe, don't approach the person who fell without protection", nor for a bystander to decide "quick get a video of the guys in hazmat suits going for that collapsed person", nor for someone seeking fake internet points to decide "I can go viral with a scarier title, I'm not waiting for a death certificate". "If it bleeds it leads" is still modern news policy, it's just decentralized policy now.
Back when I finally got Covid in the summer of 2022, I made the mistake of engaging briefly in some light exercise over two weeks later. As a result I could barely get out of bed the next day. Covid was unique at least to me in having such a profound effect on my stamina for a long time compared to the actual symptoms themselves (two days of fever and a couple more of general malaise). I can easily see myself fainting if I'd had to push myself to do anything physical then. I remember that just carrying two slightly heavy bags some 20 meters a week after the initial symptoms left me completely winded.
I had the same thing. I got COVID three times, and by the end of all of that my stamina was at an all time nonexistent.
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