China is mourning a growing number of celebrities lost to Covid-19, from academics to opera singers. Their deaths complicate government efforts to minimize the scale of the epidemic spreading across the country.
The coronavirus has rampaged through China’s vulnerable population at an unprecedented rate since authorities last month lifted most restrictions put in place to keep the virus at bay, leaving hospitals with the sick and the elderly. Crematoriums are overwhelmed with demand.
This havoc has left China’s propaganda machine struggling to form a coherent narrative and defend the rollback of President Xi Jinping’s signature zero-coronavirus strategy. Especially after two years of his playing out death tolls in the West as evidence of China’s good governance.
Numerous obituaries released by businesses, laboratories, schools, and families in the past few weeks have described the human toll from the easing of restrictions as the outbreak is under control and widespread sub-regionalism in China. It undermined the official narrative that the species isn’t that serious.
Shanghai Kehua Bio-Engineering announced last week that its founder Tang Weiguo, 66, who has grown the group into one of China’s leading clinical trial companies for more than 30 years, announced on December 25 that he had been diagnosed with Covid-19 and the foundation. announced that he died of illness.
The company recently moved to producing millions of rapid Covid tests, writing in an obituary posted on its website:
Complications related to the new coronavirus have also killed 39-year-old opera singer Zhu Langlang in Beijing and Zhao Qing, a famous dancer and politician who died at the age of 87, according to friends and relatives. Wang Tao, 52, deputy dean of Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, died of the new coronavirus on December 30, the university announced.
At Nanjing University, former students mourned the death of 87-year-old Hu Fuming, a philosopher, retired professor, and author of a well-known article that sparked criticism of Mao Zedong after the Cultural Revolution.
“Changing history and leading people. This is what a great scholar should be,” wrote one of Hu’s students in a social media post.
Some of the tributes mention Covid, but most attribute deaths to an unspecified illness.
Top health officials sharply narrowed the definition of death from Covid to only those with respiratory failure or pneumonia, excluding those who tested positive for the virus but died from other conditions.
China had reported 5,258 Covid deaths nationwide as of Tuesday, a meager number since December 1, despite projections of as many as one million deaths in the current wave. 25 people included. No deaths have been reported in Shanghai, Nanjing or Inner Mongolia since infection rates exploded last month.
The National Health Board later said that the death toll released was intended only as a “reference for investigations and studies”.
Incredible official statistics prompted Chinese internet investigators to begin recording deaths independently, turning some online obituaries into virtual bulletin boards as users added news of missing relatives anonymously. .
While students at universities such as Beijing’s Tsinghua University and Peking University tally the death tolls of retired professors, other internet pollsters estimate that at least 16 of the top 1,831 Chinese academies of science and engineering have died. counting human deaths.
In response to the growing interest, the Chinese Academy of Engineering has removed a post on social media on December 23rd in memory of the five dead engineers.
“Scholars who have died in the last few days have received obituaries. The Academy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The uproar has forced Chinese officials to certify widely discredited public data.
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said last week that he would lead a team to calculate excess mortality data and “reveal what may have been underestimated.”
Excess mortality, or the number of deaths from all causes above “normal” circumstances, is a relatively reliable measure of the number of victims of the Covid outbreak.
