As China struggles with a tidal wave of new COVID-19 infections, its funeral homes are the latest business to come under pressure.
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that one funeral home in Shanghai, which handles five times more bodies each day than usual, is providing families only five to ten minutes to grieve the deceased in a simple manner.
China's COVID-19 Chaos
The Longhua Funeral Home placed remains on stretchers so that mourners could quickly pay their respects before being escorted away, according to the publication. Currently, the entire system is immobilized, a Longhua staffer told Bloomberg.
People on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, shared footage showing lengthy lineups in front of the funeral home, with one user claiming that at least thirty people had begun lining up at 2:00 a.m. on December 27.
Due to the increased demand for funeral services, individuals have begun to line up outside crematoriums to sell their spaces at inflated rates. Local police detained 20 scalpers "without the requirement for burial services" and death certificates on December 29 at Baoxing Funeral Parlor in Shanghai, according to the city's public security department on December 30.
Even in Beijing, public services have been under a tremendous amount of stress for weeks. Health officials reported on December 11 that emergency services were inundated with more than 30,000 calls per day.
Chen Zhi, head physician at the Beijing Emergency Medical Center, appealed to locals to phone medical hotlines only if they were experiencing a life-threatening illness. According to the Beijing Daily, he stated that current resources for handling emergency calls and deploying ambulances are extremely limited.
The unknown is the real number of COVID-19 deaths in China since its quick openness. The central government excludes individuals with other pre-existing conditions from its official COVID-19 death toll and only includes fatalities from pneumonia or respiratory failure.
Since December 6, when President Xi Jinping's government announced an unexpected pullback of its zero-COVID policy, official reports from the country's National Health Commission have only acknowledged six new coronavirus-related deaths.
The official death toll for the whole pandemic, beginning in 2019, was at 5,241 as of the most recent report on December 24, 2022. Amid a rush of new cases, the commission stated on Christmas Day that it would no longer offer daily updates to its coronavirus data.
Data businesses in other parts of the globe estimate that China's death toll might approach millions within a few months. Airfinity, a UK-based health data organization, projected that 9,000 people per day were dying in China from COVID-19 and expected a cumulative death toll of 1.7 million from the reopening until April.
Another analytical business, Wigram Capital Advisors of Auckland, predicted that one million Chinese will perish from COVID throughout the winter. During the first 20 days of December, Chinese officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 250 million individuals were infected with COVID-19.
The Financial Times reported, citing two individuals with knowledge of the situation. If accurate, these figures contradict the government's most recent official estimate of 348 thousand illnesses.
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WHO Claims China Underpresents Severity of COVID-19 Cases
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has accused China of "underrepresenting" the severity of its COVID-19 outbreak and questioned its "limited" definition of what constitutes a Covid fatality, while top global health authorities have urged Beijing to disclose more information about the explosive spread.
The WHO Executive Director for Health Emergencies elaborates. In terms of hospital admissions, ICU admissions, and deaths, according to Mike Ryan, China's existing statistics "underrepresent the full effect of the disease."
He admitted that several nations have experienced delays in reporting hospital data, but cited China's "limited" definition of a COVID-19 death as a contributing factor, CNN reported.
Only those COVID-19 patients who died from respiratory failure are recorded as having died from COVID-19. According to data posted on the website of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in the two weeks preceding January 4, China reported fewer than 20 deaths from local COVID-19 cases.
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