December 20, 2022
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A man carries an urn containing the ashes of a loved one in Beijing
According to local media reports, crematoria in different parts of China are facing huge demand after the country’s government decided to lift the strict measures of the “Covid Zero” policy.
Journalist Dake Kang, who lives in Beijing and works for the Associated Press (AP), visited the Dongjiao funeral home in the capital, which was designed to take care of the victims of Covid19.
“A dozen or two people were waiting outside while people carried coffins and called out the names of the dead,” Kang told the BBC.
He spoke to funeral homes, who said they noticed an increase in traffic.
“One specifically said he estimated around 50 to 100 people were being cremated there every day, compared to a few dozen (of corpses) before.”
Not only in Beijing, where more than 22 million people live, funeral homes seem to be busier than usual.
From the northeast to the southwest of the country, the news outlet reported that crematorium officials say they are struggling with the spike in deaths.
About 700 kilometers northeast of Beijing, in the city of Shenyang, an employee at a funeral home said the bodies had been left unburied for up to five days.
The crematoria are “absolutely full,” he said.
“I’ve never experienced a year like this,” said the official, referring to the high demand.
But Kang says it’s impossible to say how big the spike in Covid deaths is.
The Chinese authorities reported only five deaths from Covid this Tuesday (December 20), after two on Monday (December 19) the first in weeks.
China lifted some of the world’s toughest Covidrelated restrictions in December after protests against them. There are fears that the coronavirus could hit a population with very low immunity as they have been heavily protected since the pandemic began.
What happens in China’s crematoria?
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Lines of cars in front of the Dongijao funeral home in Beijing
Hearses and vehicles transporting the dead formed queues outside the entrance on Sunday (18), two days after Kang visited the Dongijao funeral home, according to Portal.
At one point, as multiple chimneys belched smoke from ongoing cremations, around 30 vehicles parked in front of the funeral home.
Police are guarding some crematoria, Bloomberg and Sky News reported.
“The number of bodies collected in the last few days is several times higher than before,” an official at a crematorium in Chongqing, a city in southwest China, told AFP.
Preferring not to be identified, he said the crematorium no longer had capacity to cool the bodies.
“We’re not sure (if the high demand is related to Covid), you’ll have to ask responsible leaders.”
But the guides don’t say much.
Increase in Covid
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Delivery people wait outside a pharmacy to pick up orders in Beijing
“I spoke to some people who said they lost relatives who tested positive for Covid. This is interesting because the official death counts at the time showed no deaths from Covid. It can be a tricky question because China counts deaths from covid covid,” explains journalist Dake Kang.
China has recorded 5,242 deaths from Covid since the pandemic began, which broke out in the city of Wuhan in late 2019. In a global comparison, this is a very low number of fatalities.
But on Tuesday, Chinese officials said only deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting Covid would be classified as Covid deaths.
“Heart attacks or cardiovascular diseases that lead to the death of infected people are not classified in this category,” said Wang Guiqiang, head of the infectious diseases department at Beijing First University Hospital.
At the same conference, officials said new mutations of the coronavirus could emerge during the current outbreak, but downplayed concerns about its transmission and mortality rates, state media reported.
“It is relatively unlikely that (the virus) would simultaneously increase its transmission capacity and lethality,” said Xu Wenbo, an official with the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The end of mandatory testing has made it difficult to track the rise of Covid in China, with officials admitting last week that it is now “impossible” to count how many have fallen ill.
“One of the people at the funeral home said he saw on some death certificates that the cause of death was pneumonia, not Covid,” Kang said.
A million deaths in 2023, a study predicts
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A woman holds a photo of her loved one outside a crematorium in Beijing
An abrupt lifting of Covid19related restrictions could lead to an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths in China by 2023, according to a new forecast by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
The IHME is an independent global health research center based at the University of Washington in the United States.
The study calculated that by April 1, 2023, there could be 322,000 deaths in the country. Infections would peak by the same date, but the number of people likely to sustain transmission is forecast to continue months after April.
“China’s zeroCovid policy may have been effective in keeping previous virus variants in check, but the high transmissibility of omicron variants made it impossible to sustain this,” explained Christopher Murray, director of IHME.
The forecast was based on data from a recent Omicron outbreak in Hong Kong.
“Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China has had almost no deaths. So we looked to Hong Kong to get an idea of the death rate from infections,” Murray said.
But it seems that Chinese hospitals are not affected by the strong demand, at least for now. Kang visited one in Beijing.
“There was no real sign of massive overcrowding. But it is clear that Beijing is not representative of China. It probably has the best medical resources in the country,” the journalist said.