Beijing: Chinese singer Jane Zhang has been facing massive backlash on social media after she revealed the plan about infecting herself with the novel coronavirus. Zhang said that she had visited the homes of virus carriers for this purpose and felt headache, fever and sore throat, the common symptoms of COVID, but did not get infected and recovered in a day. After learning about Zhang’s decision to infect herself with COVID, netizens have been trolling her massively. This also resulted in her taking off the controversial post from social media and apologising to the public.
Explaining her preposterous decision, Zhang said she wanted to catch the virus so that she would not be at risk of infection during a New Year’s Eve concert. “I was concerned that my condition during the New Year’s Eve performance would be affected. So I met a group of people who tested positive since I currently have time to recover from the virus,” she wrote.
After she began experiencing symptoms such as fever, sore throat, and body aches, she went to sleep, the singer, 38, said. Although her symptoms were similar to those of a Covid patient, they only lasted a day, she said.
“After sleeping for a day and a night, all my symptoms disappeared… I just drank plenty of water and took vitamin C, without taking any medicine, before I got well,” she said.
However, her post and reasoning did not bear well with the public. A barrage of criticisms later, Zhang was forced to take down her post and apologise.
“I didn’t consider things carefully before making my previous posts. I apologise to the public,” she wrote on Weibo. “I was worried that if I got infected when the concert was held, it would increase the risk of my colleagues being infected again. So I was thinking that since it is an inevitable thing, why not get ill now when I don’t need to leave home so that I can go to work after I recover? It would be safer for all of us,” Zhang argued.
