Partially Cremated Remains Left on Road Amid China’s Spiraling COVID Outbreak Trigger Alarm

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On the roadside near a Chinese funeral home billowing out plumes of black smoke lay a pile of charred remains, both ashes and bones.

They were found next to the Henan Zhumadian Funeral House in the central part of China.

“Look at these bones, they aren’t fully burned yet, even some spinal bones are here,” a man observed while filming a video that circulated on Chinese social media. He spoke in the local dialect, lowering the camera for a closer look at the pile before turning around to reveal a large gray compound that was the funeral facility.

The video, which does not reveal the identity of the deceased, came at a sensitive time as COVID-19 engulfs China, inundating both the country’s fragile health system and crematoriums. The Chinese regime, meanwhile, has drawn rising criticism over its refusal to provide accurate infection and death figures.

Henan, the province where the video emerged, is particularly hard hit. Officials on Jan. 9 said that about 89 percent of the local population—or about 88 million—had contracted the virus.

Relatives carry the ashes of a loved one cremated at the Sipsongpanna Zhou Funeral house in Jinghong City, at Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, in China’s south Yunnan Province on Jan. 10, 2023. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

The situation isn’t looking up elsewhere in the country. Zhang Wenhong, a prominent Chinese doctor and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief at the infectious disease department at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, earlier estimated the national infection rate to reach 80 percent with the coming of the Lunar Chinese New Year, which typically sets off the world’s biggest human migration for family reunions.

It’s unclear whether the bones belong to a person or people who died of COVID, and what the reason was for their disposal on the road. A worker from the funeral house, who was reached by The Epoch Times on Jan. 5, appeared to be on high alert and quickly hung up the phone when asked about the video. The facility was running on a packed schedule through Jan. 8, the worker said.

In response to the video, the city’s civil affairs bureau confirmed it was “aware of the matter and is taking care of it,” according to Chinese media. And a nearby funeral house, without directly commenting on the video, told The Epoch Times that such a thing doesn’t occur at their facility.

Mourners gather outside the memorial halls for the deceased at a funeral home in Shanghai, China, on Dec. 31, 2022. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The regime has continued to defend its pandemic response even as countries and analysts cast doubt over its data.

“We believe that the current numbers being published from China under-represent the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, in terms of ICU admissions, particularly in terms of death,” Mike Ryan, World Health Organization (WHO) emergencies director, told reporters at a Jan. 4 media briefing, adding that Beijing’s definition of COVID deaths is “very narrow.”

The Chinese criteria for a COVID death only allow for deaths that involve pneumonia or respiratory failure sparked by COVID-19, in contrast with the WHO’s guidance to report a death as COVID-related if the virus “caused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death.”

According to official data, China maintains one of the lowest death tolls in the world. But the regime’s consistent downplaying of its virus numbers over the course of the pandemic, the waves of deaths among public figures and celebrities in the past few weeks, as well as the struggles of crematoriums nonetheless indicate a vastly higher death toll.

People wait for funeral service for their deceased relatives at Baoxing Funeral Parlor in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 4, 2023. (Wang Gang/VCG via Getty Images)

A former official from Xi’an, a city in central China, told The Epoch Times that some crematoriums were so overwhelmed in his area that they were sending bodies to nearby facilities.

A woman from Anshan, an industrial city in the northeastern Chinese province Liaoning, heard several friends lost their fathers in recent days. One of them, nearly 80, died after getting infected just before the New Year. His family was told there was a line of more than 1,200 in front of them waiting for cremation. The cause of death on the death certificate was listed as severe pneumonia with no mention of COVID.

The woman, who gave only her surname Sun for fear of reprisals, speculates that the regime has given orders barring hospitals from attributing deaths to COVID to “prevent the outside world from knowing the true death figure.”

“The doctor definitely can’t write COVID-19 pneumonia,” Sun told The Epoch Times. “How many deaths has the authorities reported? Hardly any. But you can figure it out by just looking at crematories everywhere. The deaths are far from a small number.”

Hong Ning contributed to this report.