Satellite images of lines of cars and jammed parking lots at crematoriums far from Beijing suggest a much higher death toll than the official count of some 60,000 people that Beijing has acknowledged since it relaxed its "zero-COVID" policy in December.
The photos obtained by VOA Korean through the satellite imagery company Planet Labs showed long queues of vehicles in front of some funeral homes in late December.
Judging from image databases released by the company and Google Earth Pro, the funeral homes in Guangzhou's Panyu District 2,161 kilometers from Beijing, and Shenyang, Liaoning Province, 686 kilometers from Beijing, have never seen as much traffic in five to 10 years as they did last month.
While it's impossible to draw conclusions about overall trends for China's funeral homes from images of overcrowding outside those in provincial cities as captured by satellites, Jennifer Bouey, Tang chair for China policy studies and an epidemiologist at RAND Corporation, told VOA Mandarin, "I am not surprised to see these images at all."
Bouey said that the overall death toll in China could be higher than 1.6 million by April. Given that many older people live in rural areas where health systems lack the capacity of those in urban areas, she said the death rate is likely to be higher in the countryside than in urban areas.
Some counties lack a single ICU bed, according to the Associated Press quoting experts who said medical resources in China's villages and towns, home to about a third of China's 1.4 billion people, lag far behind those cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
Bouey added that omicron caused 6,000 deaths in Hong Kong's 7.4 million population in a few weeks last spring, or about 81 per 100,000 in a month. Using this mortality rate, Beijing with its 21 million residents would see 17,000 deaths in a month compared with the usual 10,000 a month.
"This situation will be similar in most of the cities in China," Bouey said. "The morgue will have to deal with almost twice to three times the deaths compared to normal time (even if we don't count excessive deaths due to the healthcare system collapse), and overflow is expected."
Until last week, Beijing maintained that just over 5,000 people had died of the virus since it was first detected in humans in Wuhan in late 2019. On January 12 China's National Health Commission disclosed that there had been close to 60,000 COVID-related deaths. China's population was 1.4 billion people in 2022.
Nick Hansen, a satellite image analyst and affiliate at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, told VOA Mandarin that the images collected show that there have been more vehicles near some funeral homes since early December, and other activities have also increased.
"Of note was the white vehicles seen at many of these locations," Hansen said. "They appear to be hearses, buses and cars and are probably used for funerals and taking relatives to and from the burial sites."
Christopher Murray, founding director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent research institution at the University of Washington, estimated more than a million people will die from COVID-19 in China in 2023. He cautioned that the exact timing of the outbreak's peak is difficult to assess because officially reported data on cases, hospitalizations and deaths appear to be inaccurate.
The World Health Organization on January 4 urged Beijing to be more transparent about the COVID outbreak. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning said at a regular press conference the next day that China has always shared relevant information and data in a timely manner and that the epidemic situation in China is under control.
According to a search index from Baidu, which is similar to Google, the search volume by Chinese who went online to search for "positive" reached its peak in mid-December, and the search volume for "funeral parlor" and "crematorium" rose a week or two later.
Bouey believes that the Chinese government has many life-saving options at hand, including training doctors to treat severe cases of COVID, increasing ICU capacity, improving the accessibility and affordability of Paxlovid or other antiviral drugs, and ensuring the supply of antipyretics and essential medicines. However, "none of these are easy to implement if the Chinese government doesn't intend to."
Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist who is chief of the COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institutes said, "Every death is a tsunami in their local social networks, and then we just basically destroy the fabric of society from the inside by allowing so many countless meaningless deaths, preventable deaths."
Feigl-Ding believes that China lacks sufficient political will to act quickly, even in the face of an expected wave of deaths during the lunar New Year, saying "I think many deaths going forward in the second wave, from a Chinese lunar New Year onwards, can easily be preventable. Does it have the political will to do it?"
Feigl-Ding continued, "China has taken this to the position that 'Oh, you know, the infections are inevitable,' which is not true."
He urged the Chinese government to share data more openly and transparently, so that epidemiologists and public health professionals can evaluate the response more quickly; it should also immediately allow the import of new vaccines adapted to omicron by accepting Western donations and aid.
"Like all these things can prevent a lot of deaths. But the question is, you know, why aren't they doing it? And I think that's the sad thing."
VOA’s Jiha Ham of the Korean Service and Adrianna Zhang of the Mandarin Service contributed to this report.
