According to official figures, only 37 Covid-related deaths have been recorded in China since last month. Since December, and the abrupt lifting of most of its sanitary measures against the coronavirus, China has faced an explosion of Covid cases, within a poorly vaccinated population.
Faced with this unprecedented wave, the health system is overwhelmed, throughout the chain, from hospitals to crematoriums. This influx to funeral sites was immortalized by satellite images from the American company Maxar Technologies.
An increase in attendance across China
These photos, taken throughout China and disseminated by US media such as CNN and washington Post, show the difference in attendance at funeral homes before and after this new wave of Covid.
Some recent shots, taken between late December and early January, also show new construction. One of the images thus immortalized a funeral home in the suburbs of Beijing, which appears to have been built on a parking lot. In other images, lines of cars were pictured outside funeral homes in Kunming, Nanjing, Chengdu, Tangshan and Huzhou.
Videos of families waiting in front of funeral homes are multiplying on social networks, and testimonies of overwhelmed funeral homes have been widely disseminated in the media, despite the silence of the authorities on this issue.
Silence from the authorities
“At the moment, I do not think it is necessary to investigate the cause (of death) of each individual case,” said epidemiologist Liang Wannian, head of the group of experts against Covid commissioned by National Health, on Wednesday. Commission. “The main task during the pandemic is to care for patients,” he added.
In the midst of the covid wave, Beijing revised its methodology for counting deaths from covid in December: now only people who died directly from respiratory failure linked to the coronavirus are included in the statistics.
A new methodology strongly criticized by the World Health Organization (WHO), which considers it “too narrow”. “We continue to ask China for faster, regular and reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more complete and real-time sequencing of the virus,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted last week.
Source: BFM TV
