‘Whether You Live or Die, No One Cares’: Chinese Left Helpless Amid COVID Crisis

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Inside the mortuary of a top hospital in China’s fifth most populous city of Guangzhou, dead bodies have been piled on the floor after the refrigerated chambers hit capacity. Outside several morgues in the southwestern municipality Chongqing, cars have formed long lines waiting for bodies to be cremated. Up north in China’s capital, there were so many corpses that cold stores at state-run food companies have been turned into temporary storage facilities for dead bodies.

The grim scenes, shared by witnesses speaking to The Epoch Times, emanating out of China in recent days are reminiscent of the desperation nearly three years ago when COVID-19 first erupted in the country. As the rest of the world learned to live with the virus, the regime held steady to its communist-style campaign known as “zero-COVID” aimed at stamping out the disease through a mix of massive lockdowns, intrusive surveillance, and mandatory testing—despite the heavy economic, humanitarian, and psychological toll.

Then, following nationwide unrest in November, the regime abruptly made a U-turn, relaxing the zero-COVID policy in early December. The reversal was made without forewarning or the announcement of measures for a graduated retreat from the policy.

Since then, the virus has ripped through the vast population who have been ill-prepared for its sudden surge, and who after nearly three years of zero-COVID lack natural immunity to weather the outbreak.

The country is now in crisis with its health systems and frontline services overrun and overwhelmed. Judiciary and law enforcement facilities have shuttered due to widespread infections. Pharmacy shelves have been stripped bare. Hospitals, stretched and vastly understaffed, have tried to hire back retired workers in their efforts to keep up with the influx of COVID patients.

The devastation has continued to unfold despite Beijing’s assurance on Dec. 27 that they are “fighting a prepared battle.”

“The Chinese Communist Party is all about politics,” Chinese historian Li Yuanhua, who lives in Australia, told The Epoch Times. “It never cares about people’s livelihood.”

What the regime is doing now, he suggested, is to quickly achieve herd immunity through mass infections, so that the country can revive its faltering economy.

Chaos

In Zengcheng Funeral Home of the southern port city Guangzhou, workers have been receiving bodies 24 hours nonstop. “We got 90 today,” an employee told The Epoch Times on Dec. 22 on the condition of anonymity, adding that four other morgues in the city are similarly inundated. The facility has run out of vehicles for transporting corpses, the worker said.

“We can’t take more at this point,” a worker from a nearby crematorium told The Epoch Times. From burners to vans to storage rooms, all were running at maximum capacity, the worker said. She said the bodies have filled more than 200 morgue freezers.

What they told matched a pattern repeated across the nation.

In Chongqing’s state-owned Shiqiaopu Funeral House, where videos have captured long queues outside the facility, the heightened workload has forced a cancellation of mourning services. A resident who lives nearby, surnamed Li, told The Epoch Times that the funeral house has been hiring temporary staff at a cost of up to 500 yuan ($72) each day, about three times the average daily pay of a white collar worker.

People wait for medical attention at Fever Clinic area in Tongren Hospital in the Changning district in Shanghai, on Dec. 23, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

“You hear coughing everywhere,” Li said in an interview. Because of the large numbers of bus drivers falling sick, she said, buses that usually come every five minutes now can take an hour to arrive.

A crematorium in Yuanshi county of northern China was so strained that three of its incinerators malfunctioned, according to a notice photographed and shared on Chinese social media.

Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University typically sees 40 to 50 patients dying each month, but on Dec. 23 alone, there were 22 deaths, according to a worker, who gave her surname as Liang.

“It’s scary,” she told The Epoch Times. Multiple staffers handling the bodies have become ill with the virus, and Liang, who frequently interacts with them, started feeling cold on Dec. 23, she told The Epoch Times in a phone interview on the same day.

“Doctors still have to work even if they test positive, unless they are seriously ill,” she said. “Positive cases are everywhere. At least in our hospital, more than 70 percent are COVID-positive by now.”

The crushing pressure caused a hospital director in east China’s Zhejiang Province to post a thousand-word letter to staff on Dec. 25—which was the second day it received more than 1,000 fever patients—asking them to be prepared for a higher workload to come. By then, 1,400 employees at the hospital had become infected, according to the letter shared on social media.

Patients wait to see the doctors at a fever clinic of Dongguan People’s Hospital in Dongguan, Guangdong Province of China, on Dec. 20, 2022. (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Virus Numbers Concealed

The officials have, as they did in the early days of the pandemic, made it a challenge to assess the true picture of the worsening outbreak. By the regime’s account, only eight people have died from the disease since its lifting of COVID curbs in early December. This figure is based on the regime’s recently narrowed definition of a COVID death that excludes all but those who died from respiratory failure and pneumonia directly associated with a COVID infection, a calculation method unseen elsewhere in the world.

The numbers depart sharply from a leaked memo from a recent high level meeting of health officials, which estimated that 248 million people likely contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December.

Since the leaking of this memo, the country’s top health body has stopped publishing daily virus counts.

A health worker waits for people to take swab samples to test for the Covid-19 coronavirus in Shanghai on Dec. 19, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

“Three years through the outbreak and they suddenly let the floodgates open,” a resident from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic emerged in 2019, told The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet NTD.

“Whether you live or die, no one cares. But the regular people know well that a lot of people have died.”

Rise in Deaths of CCP Elites

The latest COVID surge has also seen a rise in deaths among officials, experts, and figures closed-aligned with the CCP establishment.

Obituaries have littered state-run media in recent weeks, including for Zhou Zhichun, former deputy chief editor and vice president for the state-owned China Youth Daily; politician Zhu Zhihong, who once chaired the Jiangxi Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; 39-year-old Peking Opera actress Chu Lanlan; Marxist economist Hu Jun; former National Sports Commission vice director Liu Ji; the designer of the mascots from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Wu Guanying; as well as dozens of illustrious professors at two of China’s most prestigious academic institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University.

Almost none of the obituaries listed the cause of death.

Tang Weiguo, former chairman of the board at Shanghai Kehua Bio-Engineering Co., China’s largest manufacturer of medical diagnostic kits and a COVID testing kit supplier, died on Dec. 25 at the age of 66. The company attributed his death to a complication of underlying disease from COVID-19.

Medical staff moves a patient into a fever clinic at Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing, China on Dec. 13, 2022. (Reuters TV via Reuters)

Heng He, a China affairs analyst, believes that the number of Chinese elites affected by the current COVID is notable, and suggests a metaphysical factor behind the trend.

Many of them have been the core players in the regime’s power structure and committed themselves to be propagandists burnishing the CCP’s image.

“Maybe you think it isn’t a big deal, but the CCP is a crime syndicate,” he previously told The Epoch Times, adding that the recent uptick in cases should make people reconsider their ties with the regime. “Tying one’s life with the fate of the Party will not bring you any good.”

The idea that “you reap what you sow,” he said, has been deeply rooted in Chinese minds since antiquity.

“A popular belief in China is that good deeds will meet with good returns and vice versa, and that you could see retribution within one’s lifetime,” Heng said.

“In a sense, one might consider this karmic retribution,” he said.

That concept was illustrated in a March 2020 article by Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong.

“But a pandemic like the current Chinese Communist Virus (or ‘Wuhan Virus’) comes with a purpose behind it, and it has targets. It is here to weed out members of the Party and those who have sided with it,” Mr. Li wrote.