Inbound travelers wait for hours to board buses to leave for quarantine hotels and facilities from Guangzhou Baiyun Airport in southern China's Guangdong province. Photo / AP
Inbound travelers wait for hours to board buses to leave for quarantine hotels and facilities from Guangzhou Baiyun Airport in southern China's Guangdong province. Photo / AP
Long queues have formed outside Chinese funeral homes struggling to deal with a Covid outbreak that is already killing 9000 people per day, according to a UK health firm.
Having imposed the world’s strictest Covid regime of lockdowns and relentless testing for three years, China earlier this month reversed course towards living with the virus, leaving its fragile health system overwhelmed.
Now the virus is spreading largely unchecked and likely to be infecting millions of people a day, according to international health experts.
Airfinity, a UK-based health data firm, said around 9000 people in China are probably dying from Covid each day, with the worst yet to come as millions of people prepare to travel across the country for the Lunar New Year. Deaths could peak at 25,000 a day on January 23, it predicted.
Videos from inside China show how critical the situation is. One, taken inside a funeral home in Liaoning, shows that the basement has been turned into a morgue, with dozens of coffins laid out on the floor. They were supposed to be cremated, but staff became overwhelmed by the sheer volume.
Medical personnel wait for passengers coming with an Air China flight from Guangzhou, China, in a Covid-19 testing area set at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci international airport after Italy made tests mandatory for all airline passengers arriving from China. Photo / AP
Another, from a funeral parlour in Guangzhou, shows hundreds of people queuing up for information on funeral procedures.
In the southwestern city of Chengdu, funeral parlours were busy after dark on Wednesday, with a steady stream of cars entering one, which was guarded by security personnel. A van driver working for one parlour said the past few weeks had been particularly busy and “huge numbers of people” were inside.
But there is concern that Beijing is not being transparent about the true numbers of deaths and infections. China’s official death toll of 5246 since the pandemic began compares with more than one million in the United States.
Passengers arriving from China are tested for Covid-19 on arrival at Milan Malpensa Airport in Italy. Photo / AP
“We have just limited information in terms of what’s being shared related to the number of cases that are increasing, hospitalisations and especially deaths,” a senior US health official told reporters in a phone briefing.
“Also, there’s been a decrease in testing across China so it also makes it difficult to know what the true infection rate is.”
China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reported just 5231 new Covid cases and three deaths nationwide on Wednesday – likely a drastic undercount because people are no longer required to declare infections to the authorities.
The US has announced that all travellers from China must test negative for Covid before entering the country, joining India, Italy, Japan and Taiwan in taking new measures.
UK ministers are to review whether travellers from China should face Covid restrictions amid growing concerns over the risk from passengers bringing in the virus.
Inbound travellers wait for hours to board buses to leave for quarantine hotels and facilities in southern China's Guangdong province. Photo / AP
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said: “The Government has said it is now going to keep that under review and review whether different countries with Covid outbreaks ... should face different restrictions.”
Wu Zunyou, China’s chief epidemiologist, said on Thursday that a team at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention planned to assess fatalities differently.
The team will measure the difference between the number of deaths in the current wave of infections and the number of deaths expected had the epidemic never happened, Wu told reporters at a briefing.
By calculating the “excess mortality”, China would be able to work out what could have been potentially underestimated, he said.
Despite Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin saying that “the development of China’s epidemic situation is overall predictable and under control”, evidence shows it is not.
The state-run China Daily newspaper reported on Thursday that rural regions across China were beefing up their medical treatment capacities.
It said a hospital in a rural part of Inner Mongolia where more than 100,000 people live was seeking bidders for a 1.9 million yuan ($432,000) contract to upgrade its wards into intensive care units.
Liancheng County Central Hospital, in the eastern Fujian province, was seeking tenders for ambulances and medical devices ranging from breathing machines to electrocardiogram monitors.
In December, tenders put out by hospitals for key medical equipment were two to three times higher than in previous months, according to a Reuters review, suggesting hospitals across the country were scrambling to plug shortages.
