The pandemic is spreading like wildfire again across China. Since December, an estimated 900 million people in China have been infected, according to Peking University. The number could reach as high as 80 to 90 percent of the population, according to prominent Chinese infectious disease experts.
Ever since the first wave of the virus in Wuhan in 2019, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has done everything in its power to cover up the true extent of the outbreak and its death toll.
In reality, the spread of the virus in China continued over the past three years, resulting in an immense societal impact and a massive death toll.
Sources on the ground in China have described the severity of the situation to Epoch Times reporters. Residents say it is difficult or impossible to secure a cremation or burial site for their loved ones.
Cremation centers across China have been overloaded and are working nonstop. In many cases, crematoriums have weeks of backlog, and refrigerator units for meat storage are being repurposed to store dead bodies. Cremation centers and funeral homes have sharply increased their spending on items such as body bags and cold storage containers.
For example, Reuters reported on Jan. 20 that in Shantou city, a funeral home made an “emergency purchase” of two additional cremation ovens. In the city of Zigong, a funeral service center ordered nearly 200,000 liters (more than 52,000 gallons) of diesel after being “almost exhausted.” And in Jieshou city, officials said “the funeral hall’s remains refrigerator cannot meet the current unit demand,” leading them to order 10 additional large-scale freezers. A manufacturer of incinerators in Shandong Province says its plant has recently been operating at full capacity and “working overtime 24 hours to meet the urgent procurement needs.”
One way the CCP has kept the death toll artificially low is by forcing family members to sign papers claiming the deaths of their loved ones are unrelated to COVID-19, in exchange for allowing the bodies to go through the system and actually be cremated. Meanwhile, staff members at cremation centers have received strict instructions not to share with the outside world any information on the number of bodies being burned.
