Crematoriums Crammed With Caskets Hint at Scale of China's COVID Horror

Social media images depicting crowded ICU wards and funeral homes crammed with corpses offer a glimpse of the scale of China's COVID-19 outbreak after the government stopped publishing infection numbers and narrowed the legal definition of deaths by the virus.

China is experiencing its first nationwide wave of infections after abruptly dismantling three years of pandemic restrictions this month. Internal modeling estimates the country's cases will peak in the coming weeks, topping out at hundreds of millions, but the lack of consistent and authoritative data out of Beijing is concerning other capitals.

Anecdotal evidence gleaned from the Chinese public's online posts—on Weibo, WeChat, Douyin and other apps—suggests the COVID wave is hitting China's elderly particularly hard. Crowded hospitals have been the norm for weeks, and funeral homes are cremating dozens of bodies a day.

More than 90 percent of China's 1.4 billion people are fully vaccinated, government data from late November showed. But tens of millions of seniors remain unboosted or unvaccinated because of vaccine hesitancy, a phenomenon the government is finding difficult to overcome.

"My good friend's dad passed away. I haven't been to a crematorium in a few years. The corridors are full of caskets," one user from Heilongjiang, a province in northeastern China, said in a post on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

In recent days, similar scenes were filmed in morgues and funeral homes in Shanghai, a city of 25 million, where body bags filled with corpses were packed tightly together and awaiting processing. In Beijing, conditions were no different, in images that recalled to viewers the early days of the pandemic in the West.

In Yongnian district of Handan, a city in northern Hebei province, a notice issued by the civil affairs bureau praised a local official for overseeing cremations around the clock. In the first 10 days of this month, the district cremated upward of 20 bodies a day.

Since December 10, daily cremations averaged around 30, it said, reaching a high of 41 cremations a day on each of December 17 and 18. The bureau commended the official for "completing the arduous task with utmost vigor," in an announcement that was later panned online for being insensitive.

The true scale of China's outbreak is unclear, but the health care system appears to have been overwhelmed in major cities. Officially, however, fatalities remain in the low single digits—including one death on December 28 for a pandemic total of 5,246—after the government excluded patients with underlying illnesses from its count.

After dismantling its mass testing infrastructure, Beijing may not have the means to accurately gauge the spread of infections across the country.

The only authoritative figures so far have come from leaked minutes of a December 21 health briefing, where a senior official said some 248 million people—nearly 18 percent of China's population—had been infected in the first 20 days of the month, including some 37 million people on December 20 alone.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), raised concerns about reports of severe disease coming out of China and called for more disclosure of official statistics.

"In order to make a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation on the ground, WHO needs more detailed information on disease severity, hospital admissions and requirements for ICU support," Tedros said at a press conference on December 21.

On Wednesday, officials in Washington said the United States would join Italy, Japan, Taiwan and India in requiring negative COVID tests from air passengers traveling from China. The border policy, effect from January 5, was attributed to the lack of information on potential emerging variants resulting from China's growing case numbers.

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