China tweaks rules and procedures to keep COVID-19 death figures low amid surge: Report

To keep China's COVID death figures low, the Chinese government has besides censorship, implemented a change in rules and procedures to compel doctors to hide coronavirus-related mortalities or delay updating them on death certificates, Voices Against Autocracy (VAA) reported. Authorities in China have also stopped adding COVID deaths to the official count that have occurred outside hospitals, claimed the report.

China amid growing global pressure, revealed that around 60,000 COVID-related deaths were reported between early December and mid-December, 2022. The number is big considering that the nation maintained a death toll of around 5,000 since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to VAA, many felt the actual number was much higher and accused Beijing of underreporting. Even the World Health Organisation (WHO) urged China for "more detailed" data as it expressed concerns over the under-representing of the severity of the virus outbreak in the country. COVID infections in China began to surge towards December end and hospitals began to fill up.

Many patients did not find beds and were seen sleeping on floors. Even funeral homes and crematoriums were completely filled, and bodies were seen in the queue for days. The Chinese government, however, remained silent on the rising number of COVID patients. The government stopped issuing routine health bulletins, leading to confusion over the COVID situation. A social media post by an eminent Chinese scientist and government official Wu Zunyou, however, revealed that over 80 per cent of China's population was COVID-infected.

There are fears that the actual number of COVID-related deaths in China is much higher; some researchers claimed it to be ten times the official count, said the report. “This reported number of COVID-19 deaths might be the tip of the iceberg,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the University of California. Various reports showed that medical authorities were pressurized into hiding COVID-related deaths. 

Chinese doctors were instructed not to mention coronavirus as the reason for death. “On the death certificate, we fill in one main cause of death, and two to three sub-causes of death, so we basically leave out COVID-19,” a doctor in a Shanghai-based hospital said. Liu Chen (pseudonym), a doctor from Liaoning Province, said government rules bar them from counting deaths of COVID-19 patients. “That is the standard we all have to follow. So, from the top to the bottom, no one knows the exact mortality rate of COVID-19,” he said. This appears to be a major reason for the lower-than-expected number of COVID deaths declared by Beijing.

Many people have complained online that the official medical reasons for deaths following coronavirus infection are being written as “heart diseases”, “pneumonia” or “underlying disease”. Song Guo-cheng, a researcher at National Chengchi University, said the latest death figures announced by Beijing were still suspicious. “The information obtained from various sources and online reports is in sharp contrast with the Covid figures disclosed by the Chinese Communist Party. This underscores that the CCP is still playing with the data, covering up the true scale of the outbreak,” Song said.

China faces shortage of coffins, surge in funeral costs

As China continues to battle against its worst-ever COVID wave, it has come to light that rural areas of China are facing extreme shortages of coffins and increased funeral costs. The BBC quoted one villager belonging to the Chinese province of Shanxi as saying that a large number of coffins had been sold out in some regions and workers in the funeral industry were "earning small fortunes" due to the surge in COVID-related deaths.

On the other hand, it has also come to the fore that the highly secretive CCP regime of China has been concealing information on the country's COVID cases. Recently, the World Health Organization accused Chinese health authorities of not showing transparency in sharing current COVID data.