In Beijing, funeral homes and crematoriums are busy as COVID spreads - SABC News - Breaking news, special reports, world, business, sport coverage of all South African current events. Africa's news leader.

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Hearses bearing the dead lined the driveway to a designated COVID-19 crematorium in the Chinese capital on Saturday while workers at the city’s dozen funeral homes were busier than normal, days after China reversed tight pandemic restrictions.

People wait to purchase medicine at a pharmacy, amid the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Beijing, China December 16, 2022.People wait to purchase medicine at a pharmacy, amid the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Beijing, China December 16, 2022.

A US-based research institute said this week that the country could see an explosion of cases and over a million people in China could die of COVID in 2023. A sharp surge in deaths would test authorities’ efforts to move China away from endless testing, lockdowns and heavy travel restrictions, and realign with a world that has largely reopened to live with the disease.

A few metres away from the crematorium, in a funeral parlour, the Reuters journalist saw about 20 yellow body bags containing corpses on the floor. Reuters could not immediately establish if the deaths were due to COVID. Yet respected Chinese news outlet Caixin reported on Friday that two veteran state media journalists had died after contracting COVID-19 in Beijing, among the first known deaths since China dismantled most of its zero-COVID policies.Still, the National Health Commission on Saturday reported no change to its official COVID death toll of 5,235 since the pandemic emerged in Wuhan province in late 2019.

As of December 5, the proportion of seriously or critically ill COVID patients had dropped to 0.18% of reported cases, Wu said, from 3.32% last year and 16.47% in 2020. China stopped publishing the number of asymptomatic cases from Wednesday, citing a lack of PCR testing among people with no symptoms.

 

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Nice big cover up... Nazi Germany all over again

Who believes anything coming out of China?

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