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BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Funeral homes across the Chinese capital Beijing, a city of 22 million people, scrambled to keep up with demand for funeral and cremation services on Saturday as workers and drivers tested positive for the novel coronavirus , so call in sick.
China abruptly changed its COVID management protocols more than a week ago following the announcement that the Omicron strain had weakened and unprecedented public outcry against the zero COVID policy advocated by President Xi Jinping.
Emerging from endless testing, lockdowns and strict travel restrictions, China is readjusting to a world that has largely reopened to live with COVID.
As cities across the country prepare for the first wave of infections, China has told its 1.4 billion people to care for their mild symptoms at home unless they become severe.
In Beijing, where no COVID deaths have been reported since the Dec. 7 policy change, sick employees have affected service workers from restaurants and delivery companies to about a dozen funeral homes.
“We now have fewer cars and fewer workers,” a worker at a funeral home in Miyun told Reuters, adding that there was a growing backlog of demand for cremation services.
“We have a lot of workers who have tested positive.”
It’s unclear whether the difficulty meeting increased cremation demand is due to an increase in COVID-related deaths.
At the Huairou funeral home, it takes three days for a body to be cremated, a staff member said.
“You can transport the corpse by yourself. It’s busy recently.” The staff said.
The last time Chinese health authorities reported a COVID death was on Dec. 3, in Shandong and Sichuan provinces. The last reported death in the Chinese capital was on November 23.
However, Chinese media reported on Friday that two senior state media journalists died after contracting COVID-19 in Beijing, the first known deaths since China rolled back most of its zero-COVID policy.
The National Health Commission reported Saturday that its official COVID death toll was unchanged at 5,235.
China’s sudden removal of its extremely strict policies could trigger a spike in cases and more than 1 million deaths by 2023, according to the latest projections from the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
Cases in China will peak around April 1, when the death toll will reach 322,000, it said.
“normal death”
A staff member of the funeral home in the eastern suburbs said: “There is a long line of hearses here, and it is difficult to tell when there will be vacancies.”
“A normal death,” the worker said when asked if the death was COVID-related.
No COVID deaths reported in the past 10 days have sparked debate on social media over data disclosure, exacerbated by a lack of statistics on hospitalizations and serious illnesses.
“Why can’t I find these statistics? What’s going on? Are they not counting, or are they just not published?” asked a netizen on Chinese social media.
China stopped reporting asymptomatic cases on Wednesday, citing a lack of PCR testing for asymptomatic people, making it difficult to accurately tally the total.
Official data has become an unreliable guide as fewer tests were conducted across the country after the zero-COVID policy was eased.
In Shanghai, more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) south of Beijing, local education authorities on Saturday asked most schools to hold classes online from Monday in response to worsening COVID infections across China.
Shanghai Disney Resort said on Saturday that although the theme park is still operating normally, entertainment offerings may be reduced and the number of employees may be reduced, suggesting a staff crunch is imminent.
(Reporting by Ryan Woo in Beijing, Winni Zhou in Shanghai, additional reporting by Zhang Jindong; Editing by Tom Hogue)
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