Workers at Beijing crematoriums said they are overwhelmed as China faces a surge in Covid-19 cases. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)
- Overwhelmed funeral homes in China are struggling with a spate of deaths as the country comes out of its zero-covid stance.
- One facility is so busy that it gives families only 5 to 10 minutes to grieve, Bloomberg reported.
- The demand for funeral services is so high that people queue outside funeral homes to sell their places.
- For more stories, go to www.BusinessInsider.co.za.
As China’s reopening faces a tsunami of new covid infections, its funeral homes have become the latest industry under siege.
So many people are dying in Shanghai that a funeral home, which handles five times as many corpses a day as usual, gives families just five to 10 minutes to mourn the dead in a crude way, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
Longhua Funeral Home placed the bodies on stretchers, allowing mourners to pay their respects briefly before being led away, the outlet wrote.
“The entire system is paralyzed right now,” a Longhua employee told Bloomberg.
People on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, posted videos of long lines outside the funeral home, with one user saying that at least thirty people had already started lining up at 02:00 on December 27. Insider was unable to independently verify the authenticity of these videos.
The demand for funeral services is so high that people have started lining up outside crematoriums to sell their places at high prices.
At Baoxing Funeral Parlor, another funeral home in Shanghai, local police arrested 20 touts on Dec. 29 who were queuing up “without the need for funeral services” or death certificates, the city’s public security bureau said Dec. 30. .
Even in Beijing, public services have been under enormous pressure for weeks. Health authorities said on December 11 that emergency services were overwhelmed with more than 30,000 calls a day, according to the Beijing Daily.
Chen Zhi, chief physician at the Beijing Emergency Medical Center, pleaded with residents to only call medical hotlines if they were seriously ill. “Currently, the resources to respond to emergency calls and dispatch ambulances are very limited,” he said, according to the Beijing Daily.
A funeral home worker places a body on a cart to be cremated at a crematorium in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing on Dec. 22, 2022. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
The death toll from covid in China remains a mystery
The true number of deaths in China after its rapid reopening is unknown. The central government only counts deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official Covid death toll, excluding patients with other pre-existing illnesses.
So far, official reports from the country’s National Health Commission have only acknowledged six new coronavirus deaths since Dec. 6, when President Xi Jinping’s administration announced a sudden rollback of its zero-Covid policy.
The official death count for the entire pandemic, as of 2019, was 5,241 deaths as of December 24, 2022, when last updated. On Christmas Day, the commission announced it would no longer provide daily updates on its coronavirus figures amid a spate of new cases.
Data firms in other parts of the world believe the death toll in China could reach millions within several months.
UK-based health data firm Airfinity estimated that 9,000 people were dying from Covid every day in China and predicted a total death toll of 1.7 million from the start of the reopening through April.
Another research firm, Auckland-based Wigram Capital Advisors, warned that 1 million Chinese would die of covid over the winter.
Meanwhile, officials with the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in internal discussions that 250 million people were infected with covid in the first 20 days of December. The Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. If true, those numbers contradict the latest official government tally of 348,000 infections.
The expected rise in infections among China’s relatively Covid-vulnerable population has the rest of the world on guard. The United States and Japan have imposed coronavirus testing requirements on travelers from China, while Morocco has barred entry to all such travelers.
In response, Beijing lashed out at nations that impose travel restrictions, saying they “lack scientific basis” and calling them “excessive measures.” Spokesman Mao Ning told a press conference: “We firmly reject the use of Covid measures for political purposes and will take corresponding measures in response to various situations based on the principle of reciprocity.”
Longhua Funeral Home, Baoxing Funeral Parlor and China’s National Health Commission did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
