Witnesses Recount Large Surge of COVID-19 Deaths in Their Hometowns Across China Last December

Family members of the deceased line up for the cremation procedures at a funeral home in Shanghai, China on Jan. 4, 2023. People were informed by the crematorium that they had to wait for at least a month to claim the ashes. Wang Gang/ Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Several Chinese immigrants who recently arrived in the United States can now describe what they witnessed last December when a severe wave of the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in China.

The sudden lifting of the stringent lockdowns on Dec. 7 is believed to have prompted a nationwide infection of COVID from the end of last year to the first quarter of this year due to a lack of preparedness, medical resources, and, most importantly, necessary information to the public.

There have been reports about long queues in and out of funeral homes and crematories across China. Crematories operated around the clock and recruited more staffers. Families had to pay higher expenses or go to rural regions to have their deceased loved ones cremated more quickly.

Hospitals were overwhelmed, and many patients reportedly developed white lungs, with white patches showing in a CT scan indicating areas of inflammation.

Now several new immigrants coming from different regions of China are free to speak out about COVID deaths they saw in their hometowns, revealing a sad scenario at the time and exposing a situation that the communist regime has been covering up.

Corpses Piled Up in Rental Residence: Chengdu City

A former Chinese lawyer who now lives in the United States told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times that a landlord in Chengdu, a major populous city in China’s southwestern Sichuan Province, leaked to his relatives that he had eight corpses in one of his rental residences.

Family members follow an urn containing the ashes of a loved one at a crematorium in Beijing on Dec. 22, 2022. STF/AFP via Getty Images

“The neighbors were scared to know about the corpses and asked him to dispose of them immediately,” the lawyer told The Epoch Times on June 21.

The lawyer wanted to stay anonymous for safety. He arrived in the United States in early 2023.

The rental residence is near Lotus Pool Wholesale Market, the seventh largest of its kind in China, and there are two crematories in the adjacency of the market. So neighbors told the elderly landlord to send the corpses to the crematories.

“Both crematories were full,” the old man told his neighbors.

Neighbors had to complain to the local police and civil affairs administration, and the old man finally transferred the corpses out of the rental residence to a place that the neighbors knew nothing of.

The lawyer said that several people he knew passed away at the end of December last year.

One of them was a man in his late thirties whose wife woke up to find that her husband passed away in the evening abruptly. The wife also had a severe cough at the time.

Two relatives living in a local village also passed away in late December, the lawyer said.

“Too many people died in late December last year,” the lawyer said.

‘Horrific and Scary:’ Xi’an City

Hu Yang, a former employee of a Chinese state-owned company in Xi’an, an ancient capital city in China’s northwest, came to the United States in March this year.

Hu said it was “horrific and scary” in Xi’an City after the municipal government relaxed its zero-COVID lockdowns in early December.

“Immediately following the lifting of the lockdowns, many people tested positive for COVID, and many with underlying conditions died,” Hu told The Epoch Times on June 21.

According to Hu, seven residents in his residential compound died soon after the relaxation of the lockdowns.

He said he couldn’t get any antipyretics from any of the pharmacies in the city. “It was very horrific and scary, and we had no idea why there was no medication available in the pharmacies.”

Overseas Chinese reportedly bought medicines to send to China from their residence country.

An empty shelf is seen in a pharmacy on Dec. 21, 2022, in Beijing, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Worried as he was, Hu’s grandfather was infected by COVID in December and developed white lung syndrome. The old man passed away within a week after he was hospitalized.

Hu’s uncle handled the cremation of the grandfather. He told Hu: “The crematorium was so crowded that people had to wait for days for cremation.” Hu’s uncle paid an extra $4,000 to have the body burned without having to wait for a long period.

Overwhelmed crematories across China reportedly had to work around the clock to cope with the influx of bodies and actively recruited more staffers amid the largest-scale pandemic outbreak in December.

Coffins Sold Out of Stock: Jiuquan City

He Yu was a water deliveryman in Jiuquan, a city of barely one million people in China’s northwestern Gansu Province before he came to the United States in April this year.

He had to travel to multiple residential compounds to deliver drinking water to his clients.

“There was an obvious increase of funerals in almost all the residential compounds in December,” He told The Epoch Times in an interview on June 21.

“I bumped into funerals in my compound every day, and I saw many funerals in rural areas as well,” He said, adding that local coffin shops were out of stock.

“People had to queue up for cremation of their beloved ones who passed away,” He said.

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

Commoners Had No Access to ICUs: Nanning City

“Ordinary people such as retired teachers in Nanning were left to die without getting proper treatment,” Mr. Zhang (pseudonym) told The Epoch Times on June 21.

Zhang was from Nanning, the capital city of China’s southwestern Guangxi region. He arrived in the United States early in 2023.

“Once infected [by COVID], elderly people with underlying conditions had nowhere to go but to stay at home. The majority would literally wait for their death; only a few lucky people could survive the pandemic,” Zhang added that ICUs were a place ordinary people wouldn’t even dream of.

“Local people in Nanning know that ICUs are not available to ordinary people because there are not enough ICUs even for the powerful and wealthy people. But the media never report on this,” Zhang said.

“Ordinary people are not eligible to be included in the death toll,” Zhang said, blasting the communist regime for ignoring the life of ordinary Chinese people.

“As long as the CCP is still in power, all kinds of tragedies will bound to break out,” said Zhang.

‘Deaths Heavily Underreported’: WHO Official

The Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs ceased to release cremation data for the fourth quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, and the publication of the fourth quarter data last year was postponed to June 9 this year, just days earlier before the publication of this year’s first quarter data.

The CCP’s civil affairs watchdog had been releasing cremation data on a quarterly basis since 2007. The missing of such information from the previous two quarterly reports triggers public speculation that the actual death tolls have been high.

“WHO still believes that deaths are heavily underreported from China,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, on Jan. 11, 2023.

Yuhong Dong, a former senior medical scientific expert and pharmacovigilance leader at Novartis Headquarters in Switzerland and a senior medical columnist for The Epoch Times, wrote on Dec. 29, 2022, that the pandemic outbreak last December in China “has three distinct features: unprecedented speed, an unprecedentedly high number of infected people, and unprecedented severity.”

A leaked memo from China’s National Health Commission revealed that the regime estimated 250 million infections in the first 20 days of December 2022.

Peter Zhang, a researcher on political economy in China and East Asia, said China’s COVID death toll is a “myth.”

Ma Shang'en contributed to this report.