"Thermonuclear bad": Millions of deaths expected in China's Covid wave
Experts have warned deaths will be "in the millions" as China faces an unprecedented Covid wave, which is set to become "thermonuclear bad".
The most recent wave of the infections began after Chinese President Xi Jinping finally began to relax his "zero-Covid" policy, which has seen the country under heavy lockdowns for months at a time.
Within days of the restrictions easing, Covid cases began to explode, with hospitals already “completely overwhelmed” and bodies reportedly piling up at morgues.
Public health officials in China have admitted it is possible that 800 million people could be struck down by Covid in the coming months.
However, the nation has officially recorded just two deaths since reopening, although there are now widespread reports that the true figure is far higher, with workers at the Beijing Dongjiao Funeral Parlour – the venue tasked with handling Covid deaths – claiming they were overwhelmed with bodies in recent days.
The claims have sparked rumours of a government cover up, with international experts sounding the alarm over a tragedy in the making.
Harvard-trained US epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding recently shared a video on Twitter purportedly showing rows of seriously ill Covid patients crammed into a clearly stretched hospital, with some seen lying on the floor or slumped in chairs, warning that things were getting “thermonuclear bad”.
“Hospitals completely overwhelmed in China ever since restrictions dropped,” he posted, adding that epidemiologists estimate more than 60 per cent of China and 10 per cent of the Earth’s population is likely to be infected with the virus over the next 90 days.
“Deaths likely in the millions – plural. This is just the start,” he posted.
His claims were backed up by a recent forecast by health data analysts Airfinity, which predicted China faces between 1.3 and 2.1 million deaths between now and the end of March.
Fellow epidemiologist Ben Cowling agreed with the terrifying figures, telling NPR the surge is “going to come very fast, unfortunately”, and predicting that “hospitals are going to come under pressure possibly by the end of this month”.
Dr Eric Feigl-Ding went on to explain that nobody would be immune to the fallout from China’s latest crisis, predicting that the world would soon be hit by severe shortages of crucial medical supplies including antibiotics and fever medications.
“What happens in China doesn’t stay in China — Wuhan was our lesson three years ago. The global fallout of this 2022-2023 wave will not be small,” he warned, adding that he believed the “global economic fallout from China’s new mega tsunami wave will be ugly”.
Image credits: Twitter