China’s official COVID-19 death toll is facing new questions. The death toll in one single city is now twice as high as the official death toll for the whole country.
The death toll in Shanghai, China’s financial hub, has been increasing dramatically since early December when the Chinese Communist Party lifted pandemic restrictions.
Reporters from NTD’s sister media, The Epoch Times, reached out to Shanghai’s funeral homes by phone. Analyzing their public data, they estimate that right now, at least 2,640 human remains are being burned daily in the city—10 times the amount for a normal year.
Even running at this speed, the city’s current funeral home capacity still can’t cover demand. There are now about 30,000 corpses on wait lists for cremation. The longest wait time at one local funeral home is two weeks.
Removing the estimated numbers of natural deaths from that tally, about 125,000 people in Shanghai could have died of COVID-19 from the beginning of December to last week. That’s more than twice the death toll the Chinese Communist Party recently announced for the whole of China, which sits at 60,000.