Crematoria across China are struggling as an unprecedented wave of Covid surges threatens the elderly, three years after cases first emerged in Wuhan.
• Also read: China records its first deaths since anti-COVID restrictions were lifted
• Also read: Chinese netizens are outraged by the death of a doctor
Since 2020, China has imposed strict health restrictions in the name of a so-called “zero Covid” policy, which have made it possible to protect the most vulnerable, generally poorly vaccinated.
Generalized and almost mandatory screening tests, surveillance of movements and restrictions have disrupted Chinese people’s daily lives.
The government unexpectedly ended most of these measures in early December against a background of growing despair among the population and a significant impact on the economy.
Since then, the number of cases has exploded. The extent of the epidemic was “impossible” to determine, even after the authorities admitted that the screening tests were no longer mandatory and the data were fragmented.
Experts fear China is ill-prepared for the wave of infections that this reopening will bring, while millions of elderly and vulnerable people are unvaccinated or under-vaccinated.
Hospitals are overwhelmed while pharmacies run out of flu drugs as the country learns to live with the virus.
In Chongqing (southwest), a municipal province of more than 30 million people, a crematorium has run out of space to store the corpses.
Their number has been “much larger than before” in the past few days, said an employee who did not want to give his name to AFP for security reasons.
“We are all very busy, there is no more space for the bodies in the cold rooms,” specified the interlocutor, who could not say whether the deaths were related to Covid or not.
A similar situation prevails at the other end of the country.
“Obviously we’re busy, which place isn’t there?” pretends a crematorium 1,300 kilometers away in Baoding near Beijing.
The Chinese capital and its 22 million inhabitants are particularly affected by the Covid, which has spread at lightning speed in recent days.
Authorities reported five more deaths in the city on Tuesday, up from two the previous day. Figures that experts say are grossly underestimated.
Beijing city health officials on Tuesday defended a “scientific” counting method.
“Elderly people have other underlying diseases,” one of the officials, Wang Guiqiang, told reporters.
“Only a small number of them die directly from Covid-induced respiratory failure,” the criterion Beijing uses to determine Covid-related death.
AFP saw more than a dozen vehicles waiting to enter, mostly hearses or hearses with dark ribbons and bouquets of flowers, outside Beijing’s Dongjiao Crematorium on Tuesday.
A driver in line told AFP he had been waiting for several hours.
The connection with the Covid could not be formally established. The establishment, for its part, declined to comment on the cause of death.
In Canton (South), a crematorium reported a “very worrying” situation.
“We’re burning more than 40 bodies a day, compared to a dozen before. We are three to four times as busy as in previous years,” said one employee on condition of anonymity.
“All of Canton is like that,” he added, but specified that it was “difficult to say” if Covid was the main cause of death.
In Shenyang (northeast), in Liaoning Province, which borders North Korea, the deceased can remain unburied for five days because the crematoria are “really overwhelmed,” according to a local worker.
“I’ve never had a year like that,” he lamented.