Even as Chinese citizens mourn their loved ones and hearses pile up outside overworked crematoriums, the Chinese Communist government claimed there were absolutely zero fatalities from Chinese coronavirus on Tuesday.
Communist officials retracted one of only seven deaths they have admitted to over the past two weeks.
Reuters on Wednesday wondered what the authoritarian regime hopes to accomplish by apparently lying so extravagantly since the evidence of surging coronavirus infections and deaths is everywhere: hospitals sending out distress signals as treatment rooms fill and staffers report in sick, pharmacies depleted of cold medicine, mourners crammed into funeral parlors to say their final farewells, lines of over 40 hearses queued up at a Beijing crematorium reportedly dedicated to coronavirus deaths.
Although it could not verify the claim, Reuters quoted a funeral home worker who said families are paying extravagant fees for “speedy arrangement of hearses” and “no queue for cremation.”
Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Tuesday reported Chinese hospitals are “panic-buying” ventilators and ICU equipment to handle surging coronavirus cases. Publicly-available data showed hospitals everywhere in China scrambling for equipment, with heavy concentrations of desperation in Beijing and big northern cities.
A former Chinese healthcare journalist who fearfully requested anonymity told RFA part of the problem was “top-down allocation of anti-Covid funds” that has focused on building quarantine facilities and mass testing centers, rather than equipping hospitals to provide treatment, while local governments were drained of funds for their own hospitals.
Much like the funeral parlor that spoke to RFA, the healthcare journalist said Chinese hospitals are now charging special fees for quicker service.
“I am scrambling to try to source ventilators for people who are seriously ill and need them. It’s a shame that so much of our manpower, material resources, time and money were spent on lockdowns, keeping people quiet and building so many quarantine camps, which have now all been scrapped,” a city health official in Chongqing told RFA.
Another source in the Chinese medical profession accused the government of pouring so much money into gigantic coronavirus testing programs because well-connected businessmen made big profits selling all that test equipment.
“Someone has to take the blame for this. I guess they’ll arrest a bunch of people. The way things are in China, the leaders can’t admit they were wrong,” the medical professional sighed.
And yet, according to the Chinese government, a grand total of six people have died since “zero-Covid” lockdown policies were relaxed about two weeks ago, and all of them were in Beijing.
Canada’s National Post noted a wave of “disbelief” and “ridicule” sweeping Chinese social media as the government made its bizarre claims.
“How come people only die in Beijing? What about the rest of the country?” one commentator asked reasonably.
Others were angered that the government decided to ignore the deaths of their loved ones for political reasons, especially after publishing a torrent of propaganda to assure the public that draconian lockdowns were being “optimized” because the omicron strain of Chinese coronavirus was less dangerous, not because massive nationwide protests forced the regime to back down.
The National Post rang up a funeral home in Beijing and was told “all eight cremators are operating around-the-clock, cadaver freezer boxes are full and there is a 5-6 day waiting list.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s new tactic for minimizing the political fallout from surging coronavirus infections and deaths is to change its methodology for counting the infected and attributing causes of death.
Last week, the Communist regime said it would stop reporting on asymptomatic coronavirus infections – which would include the vast majority of them – because those incredibly expensive and profitable mass testing programs were discontinued as part of December’s “optimization” of protocols.
China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday quoted top epidemiologist Wang Guiqiang explaining that the regime is suddenly very interested in making a distinction between people who allegedly die with Chinese coronavirus, rather than dying from it.
In other words, Wang passed off those overcrowded crematoriums as merely being filled with a remarkable number of people who coincidentally chose this moment to die from cardiovascular diseases or heart attacks, and might coincidentally have been carrying the Wuhan coronavirus in their bloodstreams at the moment of their demise.
Wang claimed that “only a few elderly people have actually died directly from respiratory failure caused by [Chinese coronavirus] infection” to explain why the National Health Commission (NHC) only reported seven coronavirus fatalities as of Tuesday, and then took one of them back.
“Communities should monitor the situation of elderly residents who have underlying diseases,” health officials told the Global Times, which sounds like an invitation to come up with reasons besides Chinese coronavirus to explain why so many of China’s notoriously under-vaccinated elderly are suddenly dying.
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