Volunteers sanitize a car at a checkpoint in Taiping Village of Pidu District in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Dec. 9, 2020. (Xinhua/Shen Bohan)

A court in Harbin, Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, announced on Thursday that the man who killed a COVID-19 control volunteer in February, which at the time caused much sensation and anger among the public in China, was sentenced to death for intentional homicide.

The man, Chen Chenglong, stabbed the 42-year-old volunteer, surnamed Zhang, with a knife in the stomach, chest and arms after Zhang stopped him from leaving the community due to epidemic prevention and control regulations on February 3. 

Zhang died of excessive blood loss. Chen was arrested at his home on the same day.

Chen was also fined with 656,500 yuan ($101,600).

The Harbin Intermediate People's Court decided that Chen's serious crime of murdering the volunteer after refusing to obey epidemic control measures should be severely punished according to law. 

The case has received more than 10 million views as of press time on China's social media platform Sina Weibo, with most netizens agreeing to Chen's death sentence.

In a separate case, a man in Southwest China's Yunnan Province, was also sentenced to death in March 2020 for killing two epidemic control staff in February and was executed in July, 2020.