Tag: Deaths (Fatalities)

China Factory Fire Kills 38

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A fire swept through a two-story factory in central China on Monday, killing 38 people in one of the most deadly fires in the country in recent years. According to a statement from local officials, the fire started around 4 p.m. at Kaixinda Trading, a wholesaler that deals in a variety of goods, in Anyang, a city in Henan Province known as a high-tech development zone that was once an ancient Chinese capital. Teams of rescue workers extinguished the fire by around 11 p.m., state media reported. On Tuesday, state…

‘We’re on That Bus, Too’: In China, a Deadly Crash Triggers Covid Trauma

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After a bus accident killed at least 27 people being transferred to a Covid quarantine facility on Sunday, the Chinese public staged a widespread online protest against the government’s harsh pandemic policy. It was a moment of collective grief and anger, with a heavy dose of shame, guilt and despair. After nearly three years of constant lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines, people asked how they could give the government the power to deprive them of their dignity, livelihood, mental health and even life; how they could fail to protect their…

Your Friday Briefing: Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96

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Queen Elizabeth II is dead at 96 Queen Elizabeth died peacefully yesterday afternoon after more than 70 years as the British head of state. She was Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. Here is her obituary, photos from her reign and live updates. The queen was widely revered as she presided over Britain’s adjustment to a post-colonial era and saw it through its divorce from the E.U. Her years as sovereign were a time of upheaval. Still, she sought to project the royal family as a bastion of permanence in a world of…

How We Mourn Covid’s Victims

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LONDON — Piece by piece, the Covid-19 sanctuary was born on a hilltop in the town of Bedworth in central England. The process was meant to be a metaphor for a human life. Like bones fused over time, it grew taller as the memorial’s creators spent months joining intricate pieces of wood into a skeletal structure that finally stood on its own, 65 feet high. Then they burned it all down. There have always been monuments to commemorate the loss of life from calamitous events, such as the thousands of…

Shanghai’s Low Covid Death Toll Revives Questions About China’s Numbers

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This month, a prominent Shanghai physician, Miao Xiaohui, estimated that the number of excess diabetes deaths could reach nearly 1,000 by the end of his city’s lockdown. His estimate was based on the Wuhan excess mortality study, which, in addition to tracking Covid deaths, also showed that deaths from noncommunicable diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, were 21 percent higher than expected during that city’s lockdown. “Why can’t we consider a middle road” between zero Covid and living with the virus, Dr. Miao wrote in a blog post. The post…

Covid Outbreak at Shanghai Hospital Exposes Risks to China’s Seniors

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A coronavirus outbreak is ravaging a hospital in Shanghai for older adults, underscoring the difficulties officials have had in containing infections even as the city imposed a 10-day staggered lockdown. Two orderlies at the Shanghai Donghai Elderly Care Hospital said in interviews that the coronavirus was spreading widely among the mostly older patients in the facility, and that people had died on each of the past three days. The two, who declined to be named for fear of losing their jobs, said that on a recent night they had been…

Solomon Islands Protests: 3 Burned Bodies Found in Chinatown

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MELBOURNE, Australia — After days of riots in the Solomon Islands during which protesters called for Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to resign, set buildings ablaze and looted stores, the authorities on Saturday said they had found the bodies of three people in a burned-out building. They are the first reported deaths following days of violent protests in Honiara, the nation’s capital. The three bodies, which were burned, had been found in the remains of one store in the Chinatown district, a police spokesman said. The police were investigating the deaths,…

The Delta Variant and China’s Need to Change Its Covid-19 Policy

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“How lucky I was born in China,” a young Chinese scholar declared last month in his WeChat. He was proud: Following the worst domestic Covid-19 outbreak since Wuhan, China had brought daily new case counts down to a few dozen. The case numbers — when contrasted with the United States, which has less than a quarter of China’s population yet daily average cases above 130,000 — might not seem too concerning on their own. But they illustrate that China’s zero-infections policy is no longer working as designed. At the outset…