CNN
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Satellite images taken from multiple locations china cities It has captured crowds in crematoriums and funeral homes as the country continues to battle an unprecedented wave of Covid-19 infections following the lifting of severe pandemic restrictions.
Images captured by Maxar in late December and early January and reviewed by CNN show a funeral home that appears to have built a brand new parking lot on the outskirts of Beijing and the rows of cars waiting in front of the funeral homes. in Kunming, Nanjing, Chengdu, Tangshan and Huzhou.
China has recently moved away from its strict zero-COVID approach to the virus, which has sparked mass unrest after more than two years of tight controls over citizens’ personal lives.
China’s strict policy has protected its population from mass killings of the kind seen in Western countries – a contrast that has been repeatedly driven home by the Communist Party to demonstrate the supposed superiority of its restrictions.
The satellite imagery is consistent with news and witness statements shared by CNN on social media regarding overcrowding in funeral homes and crematoriums.
CNN reported firsthand the makeshift facilities used to stash the dead in Beijing, as overworked staff struggle to keep up with the volume of vaults containing yellow body bags, and families report waiting days to bury or cremate their loved ones.
Meanwhile, China’s official Covid-19 death toll since easing restrictions remains dramatically low, with just 37 deaths recorded since Dec.
The country only lists the following Covid patients: succumbed to respiratory failure Being dead from Covid, a criterion that the World Health Organization (WHO) has criticized as being “fairly narrow”.
As reports continued to come in that hospitals and funeral homes were overflowing, China faced accusations from the WHO and the United States. underrepresents violence Top global health officials have urged Beijing to share more data on the explosive spread.
“We continue to ask China for faster, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, and more comprehensive, real-time virus sequencing,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva last week. said.
“WHO is concerned about the risk to life in China and reiterates the importance of vaccination, including booster doses, to protect against hospitalization, severe illness and death,” he said.
Speaking in more detail, WHO executive director of health emergencies Mike Ryan said the figures released by China “do not adequately represent the true impact of the disease” in terms of hospital and intensive care unit admissions, as well as deaths.
He acknowledged that many countries have experienced delays in reporting hospital data, but cited China’s definition of Covid death as part of the issue.
