Covid horror in China: Overloaded morgues, hospitals & exhausted crematorium workers

China is experiencing a massive surge in coronavirus cases after it eased its Covid-19 restrictions earlier this month following a wave of protests where residents were fed up with stringent lockdowns, mass testing, and quarantines. On December 19, China reported two deaths -- the first official fatalities since the government shifted away from its zero-Covid policy and eased pandemic restrictions, as per news reports. However, the actual number of deaths could be way more if reports emerging from China are to be believed.

Researchers are predicting that the current surge can lead to more than 1 million fatalities in China by next year. Hospitals, funeral homes, and crematoriums in Beijing are struggling to keep up with the demand, a Reuters report stated.

Earlier, China did not report any Covid deaths in Beijing since the authorities announced four deaths between November 19 and 23. 

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist based in the US, in a long Twitter thread, said that more than 60 per cent of China and 10 per cent of Earth's population are likely to be infected over the next 90 days with deaths likely in the millions.  Chinese are still vulnerable to the virus because of low vaccination rates and poor investment in emergency care

Calling it a “thermonuclear bad” situation in China, Feigl-Ding said the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) goal is “let whoever needs to be infected, infected, let whoever needs to die, die. Early infections, early deaths, early peak, early resumption of production”.

Hospitals, crematoriums overburdened

Several posts and videos are there on social media that claims that hospitals in Beijing are overburdened with coronavirus cases after the sudden surge. Workers at funeral homes and crematoriums are reportedly working extra hours to deal with the rise in Covid deaths. One such crematorium, Beijing Dongjiao Crematory, on the eastern edge of the Chinese capital, has reported a sudden jump in the calls for cremation and other funerary services, according to people who work at the compound, reported WSJ.

A worker at the crematorium reportedly told WSJ that the Dongjiao Crematory was receiving bodies 24 hours a day and that it was conducting cremations in the predawn hours and in the middle of the night. She told WSJ that around 200 bodies are coming every day up from 30-40 bodies a month back.  

Feigl-Ding, who is currently chief of the COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute, said that the current wave would not be limited to China and surge in Covid cases may trigger a total shutdown and severely impact global trade.

He added that the current situation of cremation in Beijing is alarming as morgues are overloaded. “Refrigerated containers needed. 24/7 funerals. 2,000 bodies backlogged for cremations. Sound familiar? It is spring 2020 all over again-- but this time for China, emulating more Western-mass infection approach,” he said.

He said people are forced to rush to the pharmaceutical factories to buy ibuprofen because it is completely sold out in the market and medical shops.

He added that the deaths in mainland China are being hugely underreported. Through a survey of hospitals, funeral parlors, and related funeral industry chains in Beijing -- there is a recent explosion in funeral services caused by the sharp increase in deaths.

Current crisis

The Chinese government adopted a series of abrupt moves earlier in the month due to the protests, and dismantled much of the lockdown, testing and quarantine regimes that were in place for the past three years to check even small outbreaks of the virus.

Due to the freeze in testing and quarantine regimes, the cases reportedly surged and now are hard to measure, the WSJ report added. Daily national case counts have steadily fallen as fewer people test themselves at public facilities, and health authorities earlier this week stopped releasing daily tallies of asymptomatic cases for the first time since the pandemic began.

In early December, the Beijing Emergency Medical Centre urged only critically ill patients to call for ambulances, stating that the emergency requests had jumped to 30,000 a day from an average of about 5,000, straining the paramedics at work.

(With agency inputs)

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