Chinese celebrity Covid deaths sabotage publicity campaign to downplay outbreak

China is grieving the growing number of public figures lost to Covid-19, from academics to opera singers, whose deaths have complicated the government’s efforts to reduce the scale of the outbreak sweeping the country.

Since last month the authorities lifted most of the restrictions they imposed to prevent the spread of the virus, the coronavirus has spread among vulnerable populations in China at an unparalleled speed. I left the hospitals With the sick and elderly, crematoriums overwhelmed with demand.

Chaos has left China’s propaganda apparatus struggling to forge a coherent narrative Defending President Xi Jinping’s retreat Signing off a zero covid strategy, especially after spending two years racking up a death toll in the West as evidence of superior governance in China.

In the past few weeks, a large number of deaths published by companies, institutes, schools and families has undermined the official narrative that the outbreak is under control and that the variables prevailing in China are less severe by explaining the human toll from easing restrictions.

Shanghai Kehua Bio-Engineering announced last week that its founder Tang Weiguo, 66, who built the group over three decades into one of China’s leading clinical testing companies, died of Covid-19 and the underlying disease on December 25.

“Old Chief Tang, have a good journey ahead,” the company, which recently turned to producing millions of rapid Covid tests, wrote in an obituary posted on its website.

Complications related to Covid have also claimed the lives of 39-year-old opera singer Zhou Lanlan and famous dancer and politician Zhao Qing, who has died at the age of 87, according to friends and relatives in Beijing. The school announced that Wang Tao, 52, vice-chancellor of Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, died of COVID-19 on December 30.

At Nanjing University, former students mourn the death of 87-year-old Hu Fuming, a philosopher, retired professor and author of a popular article that drew criticism of former leader Mao Zedong in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.

“Changing history and guiding people – this is really what a great scientist should be,” one of Hu’s students wrote in a social media post.

It mentioned some praises for Covid, but most attributed the deaths to unspecified diseases, another source of controversy in the government’s efforts to minimize the wave of exits.

their chief health officials Definition sharply narrowed of Covid deaths for patients with respiratory failure or pneumonia only, excluding those who died from other diseases even though they tested positive for the virus.

China It reported 5,258 Covid deaths nationwide as of Tuesday, including just 25 since December 1, despite projections of as many as 1 million deaths in the current wave. No deaths have been reported in Shanghai, Nanjing and Inner Mongolia since the infection rate exploded last month.

The NHC later said the published death totals were only for “research and study references”.

The unbelievably official statistics led Chinese internet detectives to begin recording deaths independently, with some online deaths becoming virtual bulletin boards where users anonymously added news of missing relatives.

Students at Tsinghua and Beijing Universities in Beijing and other academic institutions have counted deaths among retired professors, while Internet investigators have counted at least 16 deaths among 1,831 dignitaries in Chinese academies of science and engineering.

In response to the growing interest, the Chinese Academy of Engineering deleted expressions of appreciation it had posted on social media for five deceased engineers on December 23.

Academics who have died in the past few days have been given obituaries. One social media user commented that it’s unclear if more will come. The academy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The uproar has forced Chinese officials to categorize widely discredited public statements.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said last week that he would lead a team to calculate excess death data and “see what could have been underestimated.”

Excess mortality, or the number of deaths from all causes above “normal” conditions, is a relatively reliable measure of the outcome of a Covid outbreak.