Following the lifting of restrictions, the virus spreads rapidly across the country.
Many crematorium employees in Beijing said on Friday that their stores are overflowing by the unprecedented wave of COVID cases in China that, according to the authorities, will soon reach rural areas of the country.
The epidemic is spreading rapidly across the countrya week after most of the sanitary restrictions in force for almost three years were lifted.
The authorities admit that it is now “impossible” to count the number of cases.
“We cremate 20 bodies a day, mainly elderly. Many people have recently fallen ill,” a crematorium employee told AFP. “Of the 60 who work here, more than 10 are positive for COVID, but we have no choice as there is a lot of work,” he added.
The workers of two other funeral homes in Beijing, contacted by AFP, indicated that their establishments are working 24 hoursoffering same-day cremation services to meet strong demand.
Another such establishment indicated that its waiting list is one week.
However, the official figures do not account for any deaths related to COVID from December 4.
The anti-Covid organization on Friday urged local governments to increase surveillance and medical care for people returning to their homes in rural areas ahead of the Chinese New Year holidays in January.
The event causes the largest population displacement in the world every year. This year is expected to be even higher, since travel restrictions lifted between provinces.
A new official position
Chinese state media and health experts downplay the danger of the omicron variant, and respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan proposed to change the name of COVID for “virus cold”.
However, millions of elderly people they were not vaccinatedand antigen tests and anti-fever medications are in short supply.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Hong Kong stated that COVID could kill a million people in China this winter, unless a fourth dose of vaccine or new restrictions are imposed.
Officially, only nine deaths have been attributed to the epidemic since mid-November. the country is registering more than 10,000 daily cases since then.
And before that, there had been no coronavirus-related deaths between May 28 and November 19.
When the first cases were detected, in December 2019 in Wuhan (center), many deaths of patients positive for the virus were not registered due to strict regulations nationals when attributing the death to the coronavirus, as explained at the time by the Chinese media.
The directors of five nursing homes told the local press this week that they they had not gotten more antigen tests nor medicines due to the shortage, and that they did not have any confinement plan if the cases skyrocketed.
In the capital, employees of many nursing homes, contacted by AFP on Friday, they refused to talk about the situation at your facilities.
Nationwide, many nursing homes continue to operate “in closed circuit,” a lockdown measure where staff must sleep in the placeaccording to announcements posted online in recent days.
But, in the absence of GP offices, the Chinese population tend to go to the hospitaleven for a minor problem, and this is congesting the establishments.
Videos of COVID patients sitting on stools outside crowded hospitals and receiving saline infusions went viral on social media.
The AFP was able to geolocate one of them, filmed in front of a hospital in the city of Hanchuan, in Hubei province (center). A hospital employee confirmed that the images dated from Tuesday.
“Patients volunteered to sit outside in the sun, because there were too many people inside“, he limited himself to telling AFP.
Fuente: AFP