Several Chinese crematoriums have admitted to being overwhelmed by a surge in covid-19 cases despite the official death toll released by authorities being low, the French agency AFP reported on Tuesday.
Following street protests, China abruptly ended most “covid zero” policies, including mandatory testing, in early December, sending the number of cases in the Asian country of 1.4 billion skyrocketing.
The Chinese authorities reported this on Tuesday in the most recent report on covid-19 five deaths and 2,722 new infections in the past 24 hours, but had reported no fatalities between May 28 and November 19.
Between January 2, 2020 and December 19 (Monday), China reported more than 10 million cases of infection and 31,309 deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), based in the United States, recently predicted that the abrupt lifting of strict Covid-19 restrictions in China could lead to an explosion in cases and more than a million deaths in the coming months.
Millions of Chinese will travel during the New Year celebrations in January, which is expected to contribute to the rise in infections.
Made in a round by the AFPChinese crematorium officials said the death toll has risen in recent weeks, though without specifying how many of these deaths will be related to Covid-19.
In Chongqing (southwest), a provincial city with a population of more than 30 million, a crematorium ran out of space to store the bodies.
The body count has been “much higher than before” in recent days, said an official, who asked not to be named for security reasons.
“We are all very busy, there is no more room for the bodies in the cold stores,” he added.
A similar situation prevails on the other side of the country.
“Of course we are busy, which place is not occupied now?” replied an employee of a crematorium in Baoding, near Beijing.
The Chinese capital and its 22 million inhabitants have been hit particularly hard by Covid-19, which has spread rapidly in recent days.
The five deaths reported by authorities on Tuesday occurred in the Chinese capital, up from two the day before.
Experts believe that these figures are largely underestimated, according to the AFP.
The French agency saw more than a dozen vehicles waiting to enter Beijing’s Dongjiao crematorium on Tuesday, mostly hearses with dark ribbons and wreaths.
A driver in line told AFP he had been waiting for several hours.
A crematorium in the city of Guangzhou, in the southern province of Guangdong, bordering Macau and Hong Kong, described the situation as “extremely worrying”.
“We are cremating more than 40 bodies a day, compared to a dozen before. We are three to four times as busy as in previous years,” an official said on condition of anonymity.
Covid-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was first discovered in late 2019 in the city of Wuhan, in central China.
Given the spread of the virus, the WHO declared the pandemic in March 2020.
According to WHO figures, the respiratory disease caused more than 6.6 million deaths worldwide.
To try to halt the disease, more than 13,000 million doses of anti-covid vaccines have been administered worldwide, 3.4 million of them in China.
Source: DN
