Following the dismantling of COVID curbs, satellite images across several Chinese cities show crowding at crematoriums and funeral homes.
Satellite images grabbed in the month of December and January show a funeral home on the outskirts of Beijing, which appears to have constructed a brand-new parking area, as well as lines of vehicles waiting outside of funeral homes in Kunming, Nanjing, Chengdu, Tangshan, and Huzhou.
A small province in the Easter region is reported to have been worst hit by COVID-19. According to a senior doctor, elderly patients who were recommended to hospitals didn’t make it. The country’s wide wealth gap has fuelled healthcare disparities between cities and rural areas, with underdeveloped regions seeing a chronic lack of doctors, equipment, and expertise.
According to media reports, makeshift facilities are being used to store the deceased, as overworked staff try to keep up with the volume of crates containing yellow body bags, and families report waiting for days to bury or cremate their loved ones.
Since the dropping of COVID curbs, China’s official Covid-19 death toll remains strikingly low – with only 37 deaths recorded since December 7. However, reports of overwhelmed hospitals and funeral homes roll in. WHO on the other hand has been accusing China of sharing ‘underrated data’.
“We continue to ask China for more rapid, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said