Report: 5,000 People a Day Dying of Coronavirus in China

The Washington Post looked at social media posts and satellite images on Monday to estimate the true death toll from China’s coronavirus surge and concluded the number is much higher than the 40 fatalities the Chinese Communist Party has chosen to acknowledge.

In fact, the evidence suggests at least 5,000 deaths per day. The “COVID-19 Data Repository” by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, which tracks global coronavirus infection and death data, states at press time that the entire country has documented a little over 1,500 coronavirus deaths in the past 28 days and 17,837 deaths since the pandemic began in central Wuhan. The CSSE platform does not use the Chinese Center for Disease Control’s statistics, meaning its numbers are potentially slightly higher than government statistics.

The Washington Post said satellite images showed a major “uptick in activity” at funeral homes in six Chinese cities, including the capital of Beijing, which dovetails with social media posts and interview responses from overworked mortuary staffers and grieving relatives. 

The photos showed huge lines of vehicles backed up outside funeral parlors, including hearses and camping mourners, which squares with staffers saying they have “never been this busy” — and yet, the Chinese government claims zero coronavirus deaths in some of those areas and less than a dozen in others.

“Demand has become so high that at least four of the funeral homes contacted by The Post have stopped allowing memorial services and are now offering only cremation services and storage, an indication that the majority of people waiting at these facilities were there to process recently deceased loved ones,” the article noted.

As with previous efforts to figure out how many deaths the Chinese Communist Party is hiding, analysts told the Washington Post that Chinese citizens were prevented from developing healthy natural immunity by the state’s manic “zero Covid” lockdowns, so the fast-spreading omicron strain is spreading even faster than in other countries and reportedly producing more fatalities.

The far-left New York Times pitched in on Tuesday with an analysis of social media photos that revealed massive hospital overcrowding in several areas of China, plus more photo evidence of crowded funeral homes.

The Communist government clearly believes concealing the number of deaths is vital to avoiding international embarrassment and domestic unrest. When massive nationwide protests prodded the government into abandoning “zero Covid” in December, officials claimed they were merely “optimizing” their flawless policies because omicron was less dangerous than previous strains.

Beijing has been vowing retaliation against countries that dare to impose restrictions on Chinese travelers during the busy Lunar New Year season. And on Tuesday, it made good on those threats, announcing that short-term visas would no longer be issued in South Korea and Japan.

Reuters noted that South Korea and Japan’s requirements are not much different from the restrictions China has been imposing on foreign travelers since early in the pandemic, but China hypocritically denounced them as irrational and insulting.

Other nations have very good reason to think China is withholding data and concealing the true severity of its omicron wave. In addition to its absurdly low and transparently false count of fatalities, China is claiming the outbreak is almost over:

An article in Health Times, a publication managed by People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, quoted several officials as saying infections have been declining in the capital Beijing and several Chinese provinces.

Officials in the southern technology powerhouse Shenzhen announced on Tuesday that the city had also passed its peak. Kan Quan, director of the Office of the Henan Provincial Epidemic Prevention and Control, said nearly 90% of people in the central province of 100 million people had been infected as of Jan. 6.

In the eastern province of Jiangsu, the peak was reached on Dec. 22, while in neighboring Zheijiang province “the first wave of infections has passed smoothly,” officials said.

Claims that the “peak” has passed are not very reassuring when the peak is “90% of the population is infected,” especially when that staggering level of infection was reached in a matter of weeks — if China’s claims of nearly zero coronavirus transmission before December are believed.

The BBC noted that Henan’s admission of some 90 million infected residents differs sharply from the central government’s claims that only 120,000 people in all of China have been infected since December when “zero Covid” citywide lockdown policies were lifted.

Beijing’s claims of few infected and hardly any fatalities are tough to square with the enormous surge in Chinese demand for Paxlovid, the antiviral medicine created by Pfizer. Chinese officials are furious at Pfizer for quoting an ostensibly unreasonable price per dose to replenish supplies, so coverage for Paxlovid will be dropped from Chinese insurance plans.

China’s state-run Global Times on Monday railed at Pfizer for profiteering off the coronavirus outbreak and chastised Chinese social media users for worshiping it as a “miracle drug.”

“During the past days, a growing number of U.S. politicians and media outlets have been making shrill ‘warnings’ about the epidemic in China, pretending to be worried about the spread of [Chinese coronavirus] in a big way, and about how global economy would be hit by the wave from China. If they do care about it, why don’t Pfizer drop some pursuit of the profit, and cooperate with China with a little more sincerity?” the Global Times whined.