BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Dec 17 (Reuters) – Funeral homes in the Chinese capital Beijing, a city of 22 million people, struggled on Saturday to keep up with calls for funeral and cremation services as that the workers and drivers tested positive for the new coronavirus. in sick
After declaring that the Omicron strain has weakened and unprecedented public protests against a zero-COVID policy championed by President Xi Jinping, China abruptly changed its COVID management protocols more than a week ago.
Moving away from endless testing, lockdowns and heavy travel restrictions, China is reorienting itself with a world that has largely reopened to living with COVID.
China has told its population of 1.4 billion to nurse their mild symptoms at home unless symptoms become severe, as China’s cities prepare for their first waves of infections.
In Beijing, which has yet to report a single death from COVID since policies changed on Dec. 7, sick workers have affected staffing from restaurants and courier companies to its roughly a dozen funeral homes.
“Now we have fewer cars and workers,” a Miyun funeral home employee told Reuters, adding that there was growing demand for cremation services.
“We have many workers who tested positive.”
It was not immediately clear whether the struggle to meet the increased cremation demand was due to an increase in COVID-related deaths.
At Huairou Funeral Home, a body had to wait three days before it could be cremated, an employee said.
“You can transport the body here yourself, it has been busy recently,” the staff said.
China’s health authority last reported deaths from COVID on December 3. The Chinese capital last reported a death on November 23.
However, respected Chinese news outlet Caixin reported on Friday that two veteran state media journalists had died after contracting COVID-19 in Beijing, among the first known deaths since China dismantled most of its policies of zero covid And on Saturday, Caixin reported that a 23-year-old medical student in Sichuan died of COVID on December 14.
However, the National Health Commission reported on Saturday that there was no change in its official COVID death toll of 5,235.
China’s abrupt lifting of its ultra-strict policies could cause more than a million deaths by 2023, according to the US Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
If those policies had been lifted earlier, say on January 3 this year, 250,000 people would have died in China, prominent Chinese epidemiologist Wu Zunyou said on Saturday.
As of Dec. 5, the proportion of seriously or critically ill COVID patients had dropped to 0.18 percent of reported cases, Wu said, from 3.32 percent last year and 16.47 percent in 2020.
This shows that the death rate in China is gradually falling, he said, without elaborating.
It was unclear whether the proportion of seriously ill patients has changed since December 5. Periodic PCR testing and mandatory reporting of cases were scrapped on December 7.
“NORMAL DEATHS”
“There are long queues of hearses here, and it’s hard to say when spaces will be available,” said an employee at Dongjiao Funeral Home.
“Normal deaths,” staff said, when asked if the deaths were related to COVID.
The lack of reported COVID deaths over the past 10 days has sparked a debate on social media about the release of data, also fueled by the lack of statistics on hospitalizations and the number of seriously ill people.
“Why can’t these statistics be found? What is going on? They didn’t count them or they just don’t announce them?” asked a netizen on Chinese social media.
China stopped publishing asymptomatic cases starting Wednesday, citing a lack of PCR testing among people without symptoms, making it difficult to accurately calculate the total count.
Official numbers have become an unreliable guide as fewer tests are being done across the country following the easing of zero-Covid policies.
In Shanghai, more than 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Beijing, local education authorities on Saturday told most schools to hold classes online from Monday to deal with worsening infections for COVID in China.
In a sign of the looming staffing crunch, the Shanghai Disney Resort said on Saturday that entertainment offerings may be reduced to a smaller workforce, although the theme park was still operating as normal.
Reporting by Ryan Woo in Beijing and Winni Zhou in Shanghai, with additional reporting by Jindong Zhang; Edited by Tom Hogue
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