New Delhi: With China throwing open its borders as an end to its ‘zero-Covid’ policy ahead of the Chinese new year on 22 January, satellite images of piles of bodies at crematoriums and long queues of vehicles carrying corpses are going viral.
Satellite imagery shared by Damien Symon, a geospatial intelligence researcher at the Intel Lab, shows long queues of vehicles waiting outside crematoriums. This is despite the fact that China has officially reported only two new deaths due to Covid in the mainland on 7 January, along with three deaths a day earlier.
The official all-time death toll in China, as reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) stands at 32, 792.
It’s not just larger cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou that are affected, families and citizens of the deceased in second, third and fourth-tier cities revealed that local hospitals and crematoriums are also overcrowded according to a report Voice of America.
China’s neighbouring countries are also worried about the escalating situation. The Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency data obtained by The Washington Post shows a 23.2 per cent infection rate for short-term visitors from China to Korea from 2 to 6 January.
The data from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control shows that from 1 to 5 January, one in five travellers from China tested positive for Covid-19.
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5-10 min slot to mourn
A Bloomberg report paints the scene inside a Longhua funeral home in Shanghai — hours of waiting, five to 10-minute slots to mourn victims and fighting for space in a cramped room with bodies laying on stretchers zipped up in yellow body bags.
“The whole system is paralyzed right now,” one Longhua employee told Bloomberg.
As the country grapples with new Covid infections, Insider reported that the demand for funeral services is so high that people are queuing outside funeral homes to sell their spots.
Graphic videos, allegedly of families in China cremating the bodies of their loved ones in the streets have surfaced online.
I've seen quite a few similar videos, but haven't posted any until now. Given what we learned from other sources about how difficult & expensive to cremate a body in a #crematorium in #CCPChina, I'm not surprised if someone in the countryside chose to do this.#ChinaCovidDeaths pic.twitter.com/hxhGdhPriS
— Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng 曾錚真言 (@jenniferzeng97) January 3, 2023
According to a Chinese news website, China News, health authorities said that Beijing’s emergency hotline was receiving over 30,000 calls per day in early December.
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Exact Covid numbers still a mystery
WHO has accused China of under-reporting the cases of Covid in the country.
“We continue to ask China for more rapid, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing in Geneva on 4 January.
Eric Feigl-Ding, a US-based epidemiologist and health economist, highlights the long lines at crematoriums where people are forced to carry the bodies of their relatives and friends for long hours.
35) Epic long lines at crematoriums… imagine having to not just wait for hours to cremate you loved ones, but have to do it carrying their deceased bodies for all those hours… let’s have empathy for the horrific #COVID19 wave 🌊 crashing into China. 🙏
pic.twitter.com/aQcmmjuCTC— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 26, 2022
“China is still reporting 0 or single-digit deaths, and not providing hospital reports to WHO. It’s getting ridiculous to say there’s nobody dying in China when the reports are clear as day from inside China. This overflow of body bags was even at a top hospital in Beijing,” he tweeted.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
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