Covid deaths: China recently moved away from its strict ‘Zero Covid’ approach, which had sparked unrest.
Beijing:
Satellite images from a number of Chinese cities have captured crowds at crematoria and funeral homes amid the Covid surge across the country after Beijing lifted tight pandemic restrictions, The Washington Post reported.
An overwhelmed funeral home in Chengdu, China, stopped offering memorial services and budgeted just two minutes for each family to say goodbye to loved ones before cremation.
A funeral home on the outskirts of Beijing quickly cleared space for a new parking lot. Scalpers in Shanghai sold funeral home queues for $300 apiece to grieving relatives trying to get hold of cremation slots, The Washington Post reported.
The images captured by Maxar Technologies showed an increase in activity at funeral homes in six different cities, from Beijing in the north to Nanjing in the east, to Chengdu and Kunming in the southwest.
Social media posts also revealed long wait times and overwhelmed staff at additional facilities.
“I’ve been working here for six years and it’s never been this busy,” said a receptionist at the Jiangnan Funeral Home in southwest China’s Chongqing, describing long queues of cars waiting to enter the facility during the days just before and after Christmas.
“The freezers were full and all eight incinerators were running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The phone kept ringing,” she said.
That’s the claim that at least four funeral homes contacted by The Washington Post have stopped allowing memorial services and are now offering only cremation services and storage, an indication that the majority of people waiting at these facilities were there to process recently deceased loved ones.
China recently moved away from its strict ‘Zero Covid’ approach, which had sparked mass unrest after more than two years of tight scrutiny on citizens’ personal lives.
China’s strict policies protected the populace from the kind of mass deaths we see in Western countries — a contrast that has been repeatedly promoted by the Communist Party to illustrate the supposed superiority of its restrictions.
The Chinese government continues to insist that fewer than 40 people have died from Covid in China since December 7, when ‘Zero Covid’ restrictions aimed at eliminating the virus completely were suddenly lifted and the number of infections exploded.
Exactly how Chinese authorities are counting Covid deaths has been a point of contention since the start of the pandemic. Since December, only people who have died of respiratory failure have been included in the official count, regardless of whether they tested positive for the virus, The Washington Post reported.
Chinese health officials have tried to reassure the public by pointing to the low fatality rate, 0.1 percent, of the Omicron variety. Officially, just over 5,200 people in China have died from Covid since the start of the pandemic.
However, projections from international experts put the actual number of deaths closer to 5,000 people per day, with various models predicting more than 1 million Covid deaths in China by 2023, The Washington Post reported.
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