You might recall at the beginning of the pandemic that China was praised to the skies by the western media for keeping its COVID-19 death toll so small. But everyone with an ounce of sense knew that China was cooking the books and that there were far more deaths than they were letting on.
Now, China has almost completely lifted restrictions in the nation of two billion people and cases of the virus have exploded. Authorities are now expecting 800 million cases of COVID this winter.
Already, according to several reports, crematoria are overflowing and funeral directors are saying it’s taking five days to bury the bodies.
“The number of bodies picked up in recent days is many times more than previously,” a staffer who did not give their name said.
“We are very busy, there is no more cold storage space for bodies,” they added.
“We are not sure (if it’s related to Covid), you need to ask the leaders in charge.”
In the capital Beijing, local authorities on Tuesday reported just five deaths from Covid-19 — up from two the previous day.
Outside the city’s Dongjiao Crematorium, AFP reporters saw more than a dozen vehicles waiting to enter, most of them hearses or funerary coaches.
Delays were obvious, with a driver towards the front of the queue telling AFP he had already waited several hours.
One way China is cooking the books is by changing the definition of a COVID death. According to the Wall Street Journal, the definition is unique in the industrialized world.
“Deaths from other illnesses and underlying causes such as cardiovascular disease and heart attack are not classified as Covid-related deaths,” Wang Guiqiang, head of the infectious-disease department at Peking University First Hospital, said at a National Health Commission press briefing.
That definition is unusually narrow by global standards. The Beijing-ruled territory of Hong Kong, for example, defines a Covid-related death as one in which a patient dies within 28 days of first testing positive for the virus, even if the ultimate cause of death isn’t directly related to Covid.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distinguishes deaths depending on whether Covid is an underlying or a contributing cause, though both are included in the nation’s pandemic toll.
A retiree living in Beijing said his 60-year-old diabetic cousin died suddenly over the weekend, a few days after testing positive for Covid before a scheduled surgery. The hospital listed diabetes as the cause of death, he said.
No matter how you define a COVID death, China is about to lose a lot of its citizens. Those 800 million positive tests this winter could turn into a half million deaths given the lack of vaccinations among the Chinese elderly and other vulnerable populations.
Related: COVID-19 Could Be Tied to China’s Bioweapons Program: GOP Report
China’s 180-degree about-face on its COVID mitigation strategy is a gamble. The Chinese Communists are betting they will be more successful at hiding the true cost of their policy in lives than they were in keeping people locked down, unable to leave their homes.
Why should the U.S. and the west care about Chinese COVID deaths? China has never exposed most of its population to the coronavirus. Consider China a gigantic Petrie dish with two billion chances for the coronavirus to mutate. It may mutate into something more benign or it could mutate into the next black death. More likely, the virus will figure out a way to defeat the current regimen of vaccines and drugs designed to fight it and start killing people again in large numbers.
The good thing is that we now have a handle on how the bug works and should be able to design drugs or perhaps a less dangerous vaccine to counter it fairly quickly. We’re in an arms race with the most successful creature God ever created on earth. We were behind for a while but we’re catching up and eventually, as in our war on polio, measles, mumps, and other diseases, we’ll win.
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