Updates on China’s COVID Situation (January 26, 2023): Death Toll Continues to Rise Across China

(Minghui.org) Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abruptly ended its zero-COVID policy on December 7, 2022, COVID has exploded across China and many have died. Both hospitals and crematories are overburdened. In some places, the furnaces have been operating 24 hours a day and some of them were worn out. To meet the high demand for cremation, some crematories placed several bodies in one furnace to burn together. 

In many areas, the wait time for cremation was over 10 days or even more than one month. New crematories are being built in various regions and there are not enough coffins to meet the demand. 

Large Number of Deaths in Beijing

Bao Jian, daughter of Bao Tong (who was former CCP leader Zhao Ziyang’s Policy Secretary), wrote on Twitter on January 18 that the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau had to expropriate additional vehicles to transport the bodies. “They removed the four back seats of Buick GL8 and placed the coffin on a wooden board. From outside people would not know it was a hearse,” she wrote. Due to the large number of deceased high-ranking officials, it will now take 1-2 years to have their urns added to the Baobaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery (a place reserved for senior CCP officials). 

Bao Jian also criticized Beijing government in an earlier Tweet on January 13. Despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Beijing residents, the municipal government still “shamelessly” celebrated their so-called “success in defeating COVID.” She wrote, “In one month, 17 people around me were gone – this is the first time I’ve seen something like this. How can you [officials] explain the explosion of positive cases with 90% of locals infected? One month ago, 90% of the infected had no symptoms; but now 90% of the infected are asymptotic with 10% of them severely ill?!” 

“I live in Beijing. I think about one million people have died in this city recently,” another netizen added. 

Cheng, who used to own a business in Beijing for 10 years, currently lives in the United States. He and his wife, also from Beijing, had heard some alarming news. His wife had lost three relatives in Beijing. His friend Bin (pseudonym) in Fangshan District of Beijing lost five elderly members in the family. None of them, including a deputy director of a police department, had been cremated yet. Bin has a friend in the funeral industry. Even with that connection, he was told to wait for three months to have cremation slots. Cheng suspected there could be higher-ranking officials ahead of his family in the queue. 

More Cancellations of Household Registration

Wang Ning, a healthcare professional in Jiangsu Province, described the situation in his area when being interviewed by RFA on January 25. Based on internal data from the healthcare system and civil affairs agency, the volume of household registration cancellation was three to five times higher than normal since early December. 

“For example, suppose a city normally has 100 deaths per month, and now it is between 300 and 500,” he explained. He has some friends whose job is to process household registration cancellation. They told him their workload was three times higher than usual. Wang had also talked to some people working in other cities and the deaths in those places were also four or five times higher than normal. “The healthcare system in smaller cities is often worse than larger cities, so the deaths could be higher,” he said. 

Internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Nanjing City of Jiangsu Province experienced unusually high deaths during the peak of the pandemic, about 6 or 7 times higher than normal. Nanjing authorities established a task force to specially handle cremation and household registration cancellation. The death data is kept confidential. 

Wang, a resident in Nanjing, told The Epoch Times on January 23 said some of his friends could not be hospitalized because the hospitals had run out of beds. Every day there were people dying in the hospitals, but there were still no beds available. “The Party Secretary of my local community administration told me in late December that many people had died, about 7 to 9 per day on average,” said Wang. 

One video on January 6 showed the traffic near a crematory in suburban Nanjing. The chimney of the crematory building had heavy smoke, while many private cars were waiting outside the parking lot. The line was so long that one could not see its end. A woman wearing white to mourn the dead was crying. “What a New Year?! People use all kinds of vehicles to carry the bodies. Even Lalamove (a shipping company in China) trucks are being used to transport bodies,” she said.