![]() “So limiting a diagnosis of death from Covid to someone with a Covid positive test and respiratory failure will very much underestimate the true death toll associated with Covid.”Īccording to Wang, the Chinese doctor, the change in the definition was necessitated by the mild nature of Omicron, which is different from the Wuhan strain at the start of the pandemic, when most patients died from pneumonia and respiratory failure.īut Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, pointed out this is more or less the same strict criteria Chinese authorities have used to tally Covid deaths all along. “People who die of Covid die from many different (organ) systems’ failures, given the severity of infection,” Ryan said. ![]() Kevin Frayer/Getty Imagesīig bonuses, extreme rationing: How Covid-hit China is coping with its drugs shortage “There is a lot of old people particularly,” he said.Įlderly Covid patients with underlying conditions were dying every day, the worker said.Īn empty shelf is seen in a pharmacy on Decemin Beijing, China. ![]() A man outside the hospital said space is running out, and he had to go the night before to register his elderly family member for a bed.Ī hazmat-suited worker, who was sorting through yellow bags of medical waste, said he had been working extra hours in the evening to deal with the surge of Covid patients. Outside a Beijing hospital designated for Covid patients, a steady stream of elderly patients in wheelchairs entered the facility when CNN visited on Tuesday. In many parts of the country, crematoriums are struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies too, according to social media footage. In the nearby shops selling funerary items, a florist said she was running out of stock, and a convenience store owner said business had never been so busy. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesĬhina wants Covid patients to go to work. ![]() China appears to be seeing an increase in Covid deaths across a swath of the country that aren't being reported in government figures, according to social media posts, adding to speculation that officials are masking the full impact of their abrupt shift away from Covid Zero. Caixin, a Chinese financial magazine known for its investigative pieces, reported on the deaths of two veteran state media journalists infected with Covid, on days the official toll stood at zero.Ĭommuters ride an escalator in Shanghai, China, on Tuesday, Dec. The official tally has been met with disbelief and ridicule online, where posts mourning loved ones dying of Covid abound. Officially, China reported only eight Covid deaths this month – a strikingly low figure given the rapid spread of the virus and the relatively low vaccine booster rates among the vulnerable elderly. Now, as an unprecedented wave of infections rips through China, its state media is deliberately ignoring scenes of crowded hospital wards and packed crematoriums unfolding at home, while officials insist that by the government’s own count, few people are dying of Covid.įor nearly three years, China’s hardline zero-Covid policy shielded its population from the kind of mass deaths that haunted Western nations – a contrast repeatedly driven home by the Communist Party to illustrate the supposed superiority of its rule.īut as China abruptly abandoned that strategy, with little warning or apparent preparation, the prospect of surging deaths – projected by some studies to be as high as one million – has become a thorny issue for a government that staked its legitimacy on “saving lives.” For much of the pandemic, images of overflowing hospitals and busy funeral homes from the United States have featured heavily on China’s state-controlled television, where the deaths of over a million Americans from Covid is depicted as a gross failing of Western democracy.
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