HARROWING footage inside one of China’s Covid-ravaged hospitals shows wheelchair-bound patients just metres from corpses, amid the country’s spiralling health crisis.
The video, reportedly filmed on Wednesday by a patient at a hospital in the Chinese capital Beijing, shows some of the sick lying on the floor as staff struggle to keep order.
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It comes amid fears that China is facing a health apocalypse, just weeks after the ruling Communist Party began dismantling its deeply unpopular zero-Covid policies.
With vaccination rates far lower in China than in much of the West, experts warn the country could face more than a million Covid deaths next year.
Now a short clip going viral on Chinese social media appears to show the scale of the disaster facing the country’s health system.
The video was purportedly taken on December 21 at Beijing Chuiyangliu Hospital, which treats both Covid and non-Covid patients.
In the footage, a patient in a face mask lies slumped in a wheelchair next to a corpse on a hospital bed covered in a white sheet.
Another covered dead body lies in the next bed, while another patient lies on a mat laid out on the floor of the hospital ward.
A third covered body lies on a stretcher on the floor.
The camera then pans over to a packed hospital corridor, with patients on stretchers and in wheelchairs crammed together.
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Outside the hospital, a huge queue of patients waiting to get in are seen.
The caption for the video reads: “On December 21, at Beijing Chuiyangliu Hospital, some corpses were not transported away, so they were placed in the same room as the patients in the emergency room!”
An emergency room doctor at the hospital was quoted in the Financial Times last week as saying: “Some [of the dead] had Covid and some did not.”
Chinese officials haven’t reported on any Covid-related deaths in the country since December 4.
But staff at two crematoria in Beijing said off the record that overall deaths were far higher than normal.
Workers at one crematorium said they had seen 30 Covid victims on one day alone.
“We cremated 150 bodies, many times more than a typical day last winter,” an employee at a state-owned funeral home told the FT. “30 or 40 had Covid.”
Some corpses were not transported away, so they were placed in the same room as the patients in the emergency room!
The employee added: “We are doing it as quickly as possible [and] prioritising Covid deaths. We’re cremating them the same day they are brought in.”
Another funeral home worker said that the crematorium couldn’t keep up with abnormally large demand, and were seeing “daily” Covid deaths.
“We’re burning from morning until 10pm,” they said. “The furnaces can’t take it.”
Horror images have emerged from China showing snaking queues of hearses waiting outside crematoria, while bodies pile up in hospitals.
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In one video, vehicles were seen queueing at a Beijing crematorium, which is reportedly overwhelmed with a 20-day backlog as the devastating outbreak ravages China.
With the Chinese government lifting Covid restrictions in place for two years almost overnight, many Beijing residents are struggling to find medication and access medical care.
The surge in Covid cases is said to be pushing the country’s healthcare system to its limits, with medical staff ordered to go to work even if they test positive.
It comes after reports China is facing a “thermonuclear Covid outbreak,” with fears the country will see 800 million cases in just 90 days.
Although the Covid outbreak began in China in late 2019, the country has been reporting relatively low Covid cases compared to the West.
However, Xi Jinping‘s draconian zero-Covid policies proved deeply unpopular and led to riots and unrest across the country.
China deployed riot cops to crush incredibly rare protests that broke out in eight cities across the country, an almost unheard-of sign of defiance not seen since Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Now, with Xi’s government bowing to pressure and the pendulum swinging the other way, experts have warned the country is heading for a devastating health crisis.
One of those experts, epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, shared footage from inside one of China’s hospitals.
Dr Feigl-Ding is chief of the Covid Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute and was one of the first scientists to warn about the ability of Covid to spread when he worked at Harvard.
He pointed to predictions by China’s own health officials that 60 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion population could become infected.
And he warned that the situation was now “thermonuclear bad”.
Fellow epidemiologist Ben Cowling from the University of Hong Kong agreed with the chilling prediction.
“This surge is going to come very fast, unfortunately,” he said. “That’s the worst thing.
“If it was slower, China would have time to prepare. But this is so fast. In Beijing, there’s already a load of cases and [in] other major cities because it’s spreading so fast.”
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