Tag: Deaths (Fatalities)

China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis

Chin@Strategy

The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say will be irreversible. The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China in 2022, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the early 1960s, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment, led to widespread famine and death. Births were down from 10.6 million in 2021, the…

China Denounces Covid Testing Rules Imposed on Its Travelers

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The Chinese government on Tuesday denounced Covid testing requirements imposed by other countries on travelers arriving from China as unscientific or “excessive,” and threatened to take countermeasures. As China prepares to open its borders later this week, allowing its citizens to travel abroad for the first time since the pandemic began, countries like Canada, the United States, France, Spain, Japan and the United Kingdom have moved to restrict travelers arriving from the country. The countries have cited concerns about a surge in Covid-19 infections in China, the potential risk of…

How Bad Is China’s Covid Outbreak? It’s a Scientific Guessing Game.

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As Covid barrels through China, scientists around the world are searching for clues about an outbreak with sprawling consequences — for the health of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, the global economy and the future of the pandemic. But in the absence of credible information from the Chinese government, it is a big scientific guessing game to determine the size and severity of the surge in the world’s most populous country. In Hong Kong, one team of researchers pored over passenger data from five Beijing subway lines to determine…

China’s New Covid Chapter

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China’s Covid outbreak appears to be going from bad to worse. In recent days, local governments have reported hundreds of thousands of infections a day. Sick patients are crowding hospital hallways, videos obtained by The Times showed. In a video from The Associated Press, a medical worker at a hospital in Zhuozhou, a city near Beijing, asked that a patient be taken elsewhere because the facility was out of oxygen. “China’s medical system is already fragile even in the best of times — people rely on hospital E.R.s for even…

‘Tragic Battle’: On the Front Lines of China’s Covid Crisis

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Slumped in wheelchairs and lying on gurneys, the sickened patients crowd every nook and cranny of the emergency department at the hospital in northern China. They cram into the narrow spaces between elevator doors. They surround an idle walk-through metal detector. And they line the walls of a corridor ringing with the sounds of coughing. China’s hospitals were already overcrowded, underfunded and inadequately staffed in the best of times. But now with Covid spreading freely for the first time in China, the medical system is being pushed to its limits.…

Covid Is Spreading Rapidly in China, New Signs Suggest

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Since China abandoned its restrictive “zero Covid” policy about two weeks ago, the intensity and magnitude of the country’s first nationwide outbreak has remained largely a mystery. With the country ending mass testing, case counts are less useful. The government has a narrow definition of which deaths should count as caused by Covid. Anecdotal evidence, like social media postings of hospital morgues overcrowded with body bags, is quickly taken down by censors. Now, a picture is emerging of the virus spreading like wildfire. One province and three cities have reported…

As Cases Explode, China’s Low Covid Death Toll Convinces No One

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The hearses bearing black and yellow funeral paper flowers crept in a steady stream toward the Dongjiao crematory in eastern Beijing. Several dozen people crowded around the closed gate waiting to be let in. A man unable to get a spot in line could only watch, wondering what to do with the body of a relative who had just died of Covid. The hospital could not keep the body — there were already too many in its morgue. When he called the crematory, an employee told him he had to…

As Officials Ease Restrictions, China Faces New Pandemic Risks

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As one country after another succumbed to outbreaks this year, China kept the coronavirus at bay, buying valuable time to prepare for the inevitable: a variant of the virus so shifty and contagious that China, too, would struggle to contain it. But rather than laying the groundwork for that scenario, China stepped up its commitment to “zero Covid,” deploying snap lockdowns and contact tracing. In the meantime, daily vaccinations fell to record lows. Critical-care beds remained in short supply, even as workers built testing booths and isolation facilities. Research on…

Xi Jinping Faces Another Dilemma: How to Mourn Jiang Zemin

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The deaths of Chinese Communist leaders are always fraught moments of political theater, and especially so now with the passing of Jiang Zemin soon after a wave of public defiance on a scale unseen since Mr. Jiang came to power in 1989. China’s sternly autocratic current leader, Xi Jinping, must preside over the mourning for Mr. Jiang, who died on Wednesday at 96, while he also grapples with widespread protests against China’s exceptionally stringent Covid-19 restrictions. The demonstrations have at times also boldly called for China to return to the…

Fire Kills 10 in China’s Xinjiang, Raising Questions About Lockdown

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Ten people were killed and nine injured after a fire broke out in an apartment building in Xinjiang, a far western Chinese region, officials said, where Covid-19 lockdowns have confined many residents to their homes for more than three months. The fire began on the 15th floor of an apartment building in the Jixiangyuan neighborhood of Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, on Thursday evening, the city’s Fire Department said. It later rose to engulf the two floors above, with smoke billowing up farther, the department said on its official account on Weibo,…