The boy’s father wrote in a social media post on Wednesday that he had been unable to leave his housing compound in Lanzhou because of the country’s strict coronavirus restrictions, according to the Agence France-Presse. He claimed that it took over an hour to break out of his housing compound and get his son, who had carbon monoxide poisoning, to a hospital via taxi.

Local health officials apologized following the boy’s death in a statement on social media Thursday, AFP reported.

“We sincerely accept criticism and supervision from the media and netizens, and are determined to rectify [mistakes],” the officials said, reportedly admitting that it took 90 minutes for an ambulance to be sent after the boy’s father called first responders.

“This incident exposed blockages in the emergency rescue mechanism, weakness in emergency response capabilities, and the inflexibility of cadres’ work,” they added, according to AFP.

The outlet reported that the incident sparked a backlash against China’s COVID policies online with the statement “three years of the Covid pandemic have been his entire life,” spreading widely on the Chinese social media site Weibo.

Last month, China once again implemented COVID restrictions, mandating quarantine, lockdowns travel restrictions and deploying mass testing in some cities, in line with the zero-COVID policy it has put in place since the beginning of the pandemic.

Mary Gallagher, the director of the University of Michigan’s International Institute, told Newsweek on Thursday that there’s “definitely no agreement within China’s public health administration that zero-COVID is a good policy.”

“They’ve tried to speak out against it, but they’ve been silenced because it’s such a big political goal of [Chinese President] Xi Jinping,” Gallagher said.

“But these types of small cracks in that story—‘zero-Covid is the best policy’—this is, I think, demonstrating that zero-COVID has significant costs, including the death of a child,” she added.

Gallagher said it’s significant that health officials apologized following the incident, but that it’s “more significant if it’s not being censored.”

“Because that also means that there’s some attempt to expose people to information that’s negative,” she said. “No one is going to explicitly criticize zero-COVID, but this definitely would raise peoples’ fears about continuing zero-COVID in a very effective way.”

In recent days, China has seen citizens protesting zero-COVID policies. In mid-October, before Xi was formally given a third term, images of a protest against the president, in part over his COVID restrictions, spread across social media.

“Food, not COVID tests. Reform, not Cultural Revolution. Freedom, not lockdown. Votes, not a leader. Dignity, not lies. Citizens, not slaves,” read one banner hung over an overpass in Beijing’s Haidian district.

In Tibet, videos that emerged this week showed large protests and citizens clashing with police in apparent demonstrations again COVID-19 measures.

“People are locked at home every day and life is so hard. Prices in Lhasa now are so high and landlords are chasing people for rent. The workers also aren’t allowed to go back to their hometown. They have no other way out,” a resident in Tibet’s regional capital, Lhasa, told the BBC.

Gallagher said that there also probably continues to be “significant support” for zero-COVID policies within China.

“Partly because of the way in which the propaganda machine has really…put a lot of emphasis on how COVID has played out in places like the United States, and also the kind of the mantra which is ‘zero-COVID is here to protect the old and protect the young,’” she said.

Newsweek reached out to health officials in China and the Chinese embassy in the U.S. for comment.