Shanghai Overwhelmed by Record-High Daily Emergency Cases and Funeral Home Overloads

Scarcity of medical treatment continues after three-month lockdown

People wearing face masks as a preventive measure against COVID-19 head for a train at a station in Shanghai on March 28, 2020. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Residents of Shanghai, China’s largest city of 25 million people, were caught off guard by the sudden reopening of the city after a prolonged lockdown and enforcement of zero-COVID measures. Reports indicate that the number of COVID cases in Shanghai continues to mount and is at a record high, and the crematoriums and funeral providers are experiencing overwhelming demand for their services. Many healthcare workers are infected with the virus but need to go to work.

The megacity’s medical emergency system, which consists of 10 centers with 1,251 emergency vehicles and 4,046 staff, is currently under heavy pressure, said state-run media The Paper on Dec. 26, 2022, which cited the Shanghai Municipal Health and Health Commission as saying that, on Dec. 23,  it received 51,852 call-ins for emergency services, and 5,101 ambulances trips were dispatched, numbers that are up 33.5 percent from a week earlier.

This means that only 10 percent of emergency needs can be met by the ambulances and staff.

Shanghai Medical Emergency Center calls for the rational use of emergency telephone services, “leaving limited resources for those who need them most,” said the report.

The number of emergency cases at many hospitals in Shanghai reached a record high because of a surge in COVID patients that followed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) abrupt lifting of its zero-COVID policy.

“The number of emergency cases in the past two days skyrocketed and many are serious-illy patients. It should be said that every day’s figure is a new high in our history,” Ma Jun, director of Tongren Hospital of Shanghai Jiaotong University Medical Institute told The Paper on Dec. 26.

The hospital received 1,920 emergency calls and 118 ambulances throughout the day on Dec.25. Most patients were elderly and had respiratory diseases or other underlying diseases.

At a hospital in the Putuo district, “the emergency room used to be about 500 (one day), but now it has reached 1,600,” the Paper reported.

A coffin is loaded into a storage container at the Dongjiao crematorium and funeral home, one of several in the city that handles COVID-19 cases, on December 18, 2022 in Beijing, China. Getty Images

Funeral Services Overloaded

Shanghai’s funeral houses have a surfeit of bodies to cremate due to a spike in the COVID-19 death toll.

Epoch Times reporters contacted multiple funeral parlors in Shanghai on Dec. 23 and 24.

The funeral parlor in Jinshan district confirmed that its cremation volume has heavily increased due to the recent serious epidemic status, “and our staff is pretty stretched.”

Staff in the Yishan funeral parlor in the Minhang district said that there are so many bodies to handle that they can’t keep up.

A funeral home in the Pudong district said that it cannot give a definite date for a cremation to family members of the deceased as all times have been booked, but “you can make an appointment to line up.”

“The freezer is full, the transport [of bodies] has reached saturation … bodies of those who passed away a few days ago were not cremated yet. A wait of four days is the earliest, but even that cannot be guaranteed,” said a staff memver of a funeral Parlor in Nanhui district.

At this critical moment, with large numbers of bodies waiting to be buried, and a shortage of manpower and material resources, the Shanghai Funeral Service Center is recruiting male corpse handlers that are Communist Party members, according to a letter issued on Dec. 26 by Binhai Ancient Garden, a Shanghai public cemetery.

When The Epoch Times reached the Binhai Ancient Garden’s Xuhui district office for comment, the staff responded that the initiative is only for its internal staff, not for external recruitment.

High Infection Rate Among Health Care Workers

The COVID-19 virus has dramatically hit Shanghai healthcare workers. Wu Hejin, the head nurse on the first floor of the emergency department of Shanghai Putuo District Central Hospital, told The Paper that there are 40 nurses on the first floor and almost all of them have tested positive for COVID , and despite having a fever and coughing, they have had “almost no rest” for more than 10 days.

The official media described the situation as a “positive energy” story, implying that the nurses who tested positive, whether they had symptoms or not, all insist on working.

At the Shanghai Renji East Hospital, since late December, the workload of the hospital’s emergency department reached five times the usual level. As of Dec. 24, only four of the 31 doctors in the emergency department have not had COVID-19. The staff infection rate reached 87 percent and the proportion of nurses infected exceeded 60 percent, according to a Dec. 26 report in Beijing Daily.

Shanghai Deji Hospital posted on WeChat on Dec. 21 that there are an estimated 5.43 million “positives” in Shanghai, with 12.5 million people—half Shanghai’s population—expected to be contagious by the end of the year. The hospital also said, “In this tragic battle, the entire Greater Shanghai will fall, and we will infect all the staff of the hospital! We will infect the whole family! Our patients will all be infected! We have no choice, and we cannot escape,” Reuters reported on Dec.22.

The article was censored the next day.

Pregnant Women in Danger

Pregnant women and women in labor are at an ultra-high risk of infection as they can barely avoid going to the hospital.

A woman, who had just been discharged from the hospital after giving birth, told a Chinese financial media on Dec. 27 that “when I was on the surgical table for cesarean section, I heard the dialogue between medical staff saying they were all positive and had to do surgery,”

Another woman who was discharged from Shanghai Red House Hospital on Dec. 19 said that, “there are no mothers and fathers who have not tested positive,” among those admitted and then discharged since Dec.10, “Even if you are admitted to a VIP single room, it is inevitable that you will be cross-infected in the ward because the medical staff is the same group of people.”

A maternity nurse, not wearing a mask, feeds a newborn at a private maternity hospital on March 12, 2020 in Wuhan, Hubei, China. Stringer/Getty Images

The newborns in the hospital are also at high risk of infection.

Tragedy Continues

Shanghai was heavily impacted by the government’s zero-COVID policy during three months of lockdown in early April through late June 2022; but problems resurfaced after the CCP suddenly opened the city without medical preparation.

An article titled “Shanghai’s 20 million people silent for three months, in vain,” posted online by BackChina.com, said: “After three months of silence, the direct economic loss has exceeded trillions, and the indirect impact on the Yangtze River Delta industrial chain will be magnified several times.” But the huge cost of Shanghai’s silence and the lessons have not been fully learned.

The article said that the sudden policy reversal, from the government to the medical department, to the public, appears to be a mess, including the lack of psychological preparation for the public, the lack of preparation for basic drugs, the lack of preparation for medical resources, and the lack of a top-level plan.

Daisy Li contributed to this article.