Beijing CNN –
For much of the pandemic, images of America’s overwhelmed hospitals and busy funeral homes have featured heavily on China’s state-controlled television, where the deaths of more than a million Americans from Covid have been describe as a major failure of Western democracy.
Now, as an unprecedented wave of infections hits China, its state media willfully ignores the scenes of crowded hospital wards and full crematoria unfolding at home, while officials insist that according to the count of own government, few people die from Covid.
For nearly three years, China’s hardline zero-Covid policy shielded its population from the kind of mass deaths that dogged Western nations, a contrast the Communist Party repeatedly drove home to illustrate the supposed superiority of his government.
But as China abruptly abandoned that strategy, with little warning or apparent preparation, the prospect of rising deaths, projected by some studies as high as a million, has become a thorny issue for a government that had for its legitimacy to “save lives”. ”
Officially, China recorded only eight deaths from Covid this month, a surprisingly low figure given the rapid spread of the virus and relatively low vaccine booster rates among the vulnerable elderly.
The official count has been met with disbelief and ridicule online, where posts of mourning from loved ones dying of Covid abound. Caixin, a Chinese financial magazine known for its investigative articles, reported the deaths of two veteran state media journalists infected with Covid, days after the official toll stood at zero.
Other posts on social media have described the frustration experienced by many trying to get a hearse and the difficulty of getting a cremation slot at a funeral home.
When CNN visited a major crematorium in Beijing on Tuesday, the parking lot was completely full, with a long line of cars snaking around the cremation area waiting to get in. Smoke was constantly billowing from the ovens, while yellow bags piled up inside the metal bins. .
Grieving family members waiting in line held photos of the deceased. Some told CNN they had been waiting for more than a day to cremate their loved ones, who died after contracting Covid. One man told CNN that the hospital where his friend died was too full to hold the body because so many people had died there. His friend’s body was left on the hospital floor, he said.
At nearby stores that sell funeral goods, a florist said they were selling out, and the owner of a convenience store said business had never been so busy.
In many parts of the country, crematoria are also struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies, according to images on social media.
Outside a Beijing hospital designated for Covid patients, a steady stream of elderly patients in wheelchairs entered the facility when CNN visited on Tuesday. A man outside the hospital said space is running out and he had to go the night before to register his elderly relative for a bed.
A worker dressed in hazmat, who was sorting yellow bags of medical waste, said he had been working extra hours in the evening to cope with the surge in Covid patients. “There are a lot of older people especially,” he said.
Elderly Covid patients with underlying conditions were dying every day, the worker said.
China has reported fewer Covid deaths since zero-Covid was ruled out. CNN is seeing a different story
Faced with growing skepticism that it is downplaying Covid deaths, the Chinese government defended the accuracy of its official count by revealing it had updated its method of counting fatalities from the virus.
According to the National Health Commission’s latest guidelines, only those whose death is caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting the virus are classified as dead from Covid, said Wang Guiqiang, a leading infectious disease doctor. at a press conference on Tuesday.
Those deemed to have died from another underlying disease or condition, such as a heart attack, will not be counted as having died from the virus, even if they were sick with Covid at the time. he said.
Commenting on China’s criteria for counting Covid deaths on Wednesday, the World Health Organization’s head of emergencies, Michael Ryan, said the definition was “quite narrow”.
“People who die from Covid die from the failure of many different systems (organs), given the severity of the infection,” Ryan said. “Therefore, limiting a diagnosis of death from Covid to someone with a positive Covid test and respiratory failure will greatly underestimate the true number of deaths associated with Covid.”
According to Wang, the Chinese doctor, the change in definition was necessary because of the mild nature of Omicron, which is different from the Wuhan strain at the beginning of the pandemic, when most patients died of pneumonia and failure respiratory
But Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, pointed out that this is roughly the same strict criteria that Chinese authorities have used to count Covid deaths over time.
The definition was only slightly expanded in April this year to include some Covid patients who died from underlying conditions during the Shanghai lockdown to justify the draconian restrictions, Jin said.
During Shanghai’s outbreak from March to May, city officials reported 588 deaths from Covid out of about 600,000 infections. But once the city’s lockdown was lifted, the death toll across the country remained at zero for the next six months, despite the number of infections reaching the hundreds of thousands. Then, in late November, Beijing announced that three octogenarians had died from underlying Covid conditions, just as the city increased its own Covid restrictions amid a growing outbreak.
According to Jin, these inconsistencies reveal that China’s method of counting Covid deaths is “totally subjective”. “The death data has been misleading from the beginning,” he said.
Counting deaths from Covid versus deaths from Covid has been a topic of debate around the world since the start of the pandemic, said Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong.
Most countries, including the United States, decided it is too difficult to assess each death to know whether Covid was a factor and counted Covid deaths in their official death toll, Cowling said.
But he noted that the debate over how to count Covid deaths would be overshadowed by a bigger problem in China, namely that too few PCR tests are being done after the government reversed mass testing.
“We know that there are already many, many deaths from Covid. And they are not being counted with the Chinese method or with the American method, because the tests are not being done,” he said.
“The substantial reduction in testing would have a larger effect on the death statistics that we will see in the next month or two.”