Exclusive Report—'Dark Humor' China's COVID 19 Death Toll In Focus | part 2

About the 1st of April 2020, the Chinese statistics just shut down on COVID, reporting COVID mortality, reporting anything really related to COVID. Prior to April 2020, COVID-19 was raging in Wuhan with an unusually high case fatality rate, over four times higher than the rest of the world's. On April 17, 2020, official COVID-19 mortality figures in mainland China dropped to zero until next year's January. The official 0.0% case fatality rate over three different time periods lasted for a total of two years. But that's not because the virus has been eliminated. During these periods, China officially reported a total of over 270,000 COVID-19 cases without a single death attributed to the disease. Any figures that are coming out of the official Chinese channels these days are just to be almost dismissed out of hand. To solve the puzzle between China's reported COVID-19 death rates and the true death rates, Calhoun has taken an approach called excess mortality. It basically compares current levels of COVID-19 impacted mortality with past trends to reveal the surplus deaths over the normal baseline. According to United Nations data, China's crude death rate jumped significantly in 2019. It increased by six times the previous decade's trend line. Prior to 2019, the rate had been increasing slowly, reflecting an aging population. The sudden increase from 2019 continued in 2020 and 2021. By 2021, over two years into the pandemic, the sharp inflection since 2019 added about a million surplus deaths above the trend line. There was some kind of public health crisis that added at least one million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021. What could that public health crisis have been? Well, I think COVID is probably at the top of the list for answering that question. In 2021, the official figure of China's COVID-19 deaths was just over 5,000. In other words, China reported less than 1% of the total unreported COVID-19 deaths in the country. Yet that undercount only makes up 6% of China's official COVID-19 death toll so far, meaning the overall undercount could be even greater. So how many people actually died? All the indications suggest that it's going to be in the millions of COVID deaths. According to CEIC data, crematorium industry shows a steady decline in overall mortality in China before 2019. Then there was a turnaround. Coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of employees in the cremation industry made a sudden upward shift in 2019. The number of crematoria increased by more than 10% in 2021. And over 600 additional furnaces were built to meet the surging demand. But keep in mind that these figures are just based on the official data that Chinese authorities decide to make available. There are actually more cremated corpses than the official count in this 10% crematoria increase. Dr. Dong is the former department head of a Swiss drug corporation. She shared a shocking video with us, received from an insider contact in China early in January. The video captured corpses scattered on a city street in China. As we can see in the video, the street is full of corpses piled up, those we can see. There's also this temporary small tent, although we can't see what's inside. According to our speculation, they too should be filled with corpses. He then said that up the stairs were also corpses. The man who recorded the video also suggested that people spend their money as soon as possible and enjoy their life. As one never knows how much time they have left. This video struck me because this is just a small to medium-sized city. What is it like in big cities? In December and January, these two months, the number of people who died in Beijing, Shanghai and small counties was 10 times higher than usual. So in China, let's say we have 12 months a year, then the amount of deaths per month is the same as for a whole year. So how many deaths are there really? A prominent Chinese intellectual with a master's degree from Harvard disclosed the following information on Twitter in December 2022. Beijing has seen 8,000 daily deaths, a fourfold increase. The peak death toll was 10,700 on December 21st, 2022. A cold meat warehouse has been opened to house 15,000 corpses because the mortuaries in every hospital are full. However, there are more corpses piled up outside. Beijing's party leader, while having a fever, cried out loud when he witnessed this. China affairs analyst, Qin Peng, gives his estimate. Every crematorium is basically five to ten times more crowded than usual. China's death toll is about 10 million per year. There is a large backlog of unfinished bodies. So we estimate 10 million to 20 million deaths as the total number, which is fairly conservative. Do similar situations in the city occur in rural China? The answer remains unclear because there is little to no official information available in rural areas. But that's a huge information loss, given nearly 160 million more people live in rural China than in the entire U.S. And virtually all of these people were poorly prepared for the virus wave. Because in many other countries, the rural population is not as large and not as underserved. And the elderly have been vaccinated more aggressively. China's official vaccination rate is 90 percent. But it's misleading to think China is fully vaccinated. Earlier in 2022, vaccination efforts in China came to a halt as resources were redirected toward zero COVID-19 policy testing programs. So far, one third of the high-risk older population have not been fully vaccinated. And 15 percent of China's population were compromised by other health problems. So those are the two accelerants, as I'm calling them, that are going to make the eventual calculation of the death toll in China worse than it might have been. The highly vulnerable segment comprises over 300 million people. While under China's abrupt transition from a state of absolute zero COVID-19, a form of isolation, to a state of complete freedom, in fact, many people's immune systems failed, owing to the sudden suppression and testing leading to death. But even those vaccinated received doses that only protect against the virus's original strain. That's because Chinese vaccines were developed based on earlier variants. They are considered ineffective against current strains. So in this case, we believe the mortality rate in China could be even higher. The theory of Dunbar's numbers holds that we can only really maintain about 150 connections at once, limited by a ratio between our brain size and group size. Using the rule of 150, we can also estimate how tragic the situation is in terms of death. In mid-January, a Chinese official's daughter wrote on Twitter that 17 of her friends and relatives had died in less than a month. According to the 150 rule, 17 divided by 150 is 11.3 percent. In other words, if 11.33 percent is applied to the entire country, then there are actually over 100 million deaths, correct? Of course, deaths are unevenly distributed. However, it can partially reflect the extent of this outbreak, even among people that I know that have lost relatives. During the outbreak, media reported on a shortage of coffins in China's countryside, where people prefer to bury bodies rather than opt for cremation. Funeral costs also skyrocketed. A number of places have reported that multiple families in a village are holding funerals on the same day. And there are such families in a village every day. There are many such reports. The countryside has been dotted with many new graves everywhere. Under these circumstances, the death toll for China will certainly differ from what has been calculated in the past. Like hundreds of thousands, millions or tens of millions. These are definitely not the scale at this time. There are other practices in China that will likely increase the death total. Due to surging demand, crematoria have reportedly been placing multiple corpses in one furnace at a time. High death rates also lead to difficulty in cremating bodies, resulting in a lower cremation rate, meaning more people would prefer to bury bodies rather than opt for cremation. That lowers the cremation rate compared to China's official figure of 58 percent in 2021. To calculate a more accurate picture of the COVID-19 pandemic's toll in China, Dr. Dong used an equation based on the official number of cremation furnaces and the cremation rate. Her result is staggering. We calculated how long each furnace burns and then multiplied it according to 365 days a year. By multiplying 24 corpses per day per furnace by the total number of cremation furnaces and the number of days per year, her total estimate lands around 58 million cremations in 2020 alone. In 2020, China had a cremation rate of over one-half percent, taking into account that half may have been buried, the total number of deaths in China in 2020 could be a staggering 100 million. And then we came back to make an overall estimate, which is around 380 million. Dong's model estimates the number of COVID-19 deaths in China from 2020 to 2022. Dong says her research aims to raise society's awareness of China's population problem. We emphasize an order of magnitude, not the model itself. While some numbers may have deviations, we believe the size of the result is roughly accurate. Her work is driven by the implausible mortality rates being reported by Chinese authorities during the pandemic. If we're talking about a country, imagine that hundreds of millions of people have died around you in the past three or four years. And you don't know anything about it. Let's think about what it feels like. Do you think you'll be calm? Can you still sit in the house eating your breakfast and drinking coffee? In January, Beijing and at least nine other cities stopped publishing quarterly cremation numbers for the end of 2022. I don't think that they could recover the data internally to give a good idea of it. I think we're always going to be relying upon these external perspectives to get a sense of how much the impact was. In contrast to China's official figures, the researchers' estimates were far different. Could there be an explanation? In the case of India, you're looking at a similar situation to China where there was, I think in China, there was clearly an active decision after April of 2020 to suppress the data pretty much completely. And that's continuing. That's by only looking at the numbers and trying to interpret them. Yet the numbers Calhoun sees from Chinese officials, quote, scream manipulation. There is an intentional, an intention on the part of the government in China to conceal the information, to misrepresent the extent of the impact. One argument for Beijing's data suppression to sustain its zero COVID-19 claim. The policy has become a signature of Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping, rolled out across China since the citywide lockdown of Wuhan in 2019. He called it a people's war, or the nation's struggle to defeat an invisible enemy. Human power can win the battle against the virus. And this is totally fitting to the Atheism and Communist ideology. Xi insisted the policy was best for the country, despite mounting evidence suggesting that it's not. Yet still, China's official data backs up his claim. The figure marks China with the lowest death rate of any major country worldwide. A COVID-19 mortality rate nearly 60 times lower than the U.S. And 11 times lower than Korea's, nine times lower than New Zealand's, and five times lower than Singapore's. All three countries had strict virus restrictions. China's prestige, Beijing's prestige, the regime's prestige, is based upon this idea that they are really just good managers of everything that's going on in the country. So they can use all kinds of ways to present a very wonderful story, like the one that happened in Wuhan. Due to patchy or lacking data, there are very few official numbers that reflect COVID-19 deaths for China. This has fueled some theories. Like Beijing's zero COVID-19 policy has actually stopped most COVID-19 deaths. Though not everyone bought the story. At the very least, low-to-zero official numbers have been reported. That marks the most challenging part of our investigation into China's COVID-19 death toll. During the ongoing pandemic, it has been difficult to predict the future of China. But there are some things that we can do. We can do more. During the ongoing pandemic, it has been difficult to find out what has happened to COVID-19 victims in China. They couldn't write books, make videos or post online about what happened to them. In the case of those still living, their family members, their voices were suppressed by officials amid China's strict censorship. And that's why you can't feel the tragedy. The first is that the CCP blocked and covered up the death. Second, disasters occur on different scales. And they're not evenly distributed. So people feel it differently. For example, a now U.S. resident who lost multiple family members to Beijing's virus surge voices very different views on the outbreak. Within eight days, I lost five close relatives. He said his grandmother and uncle-in-law had tested positive for COVID-19 before they died. While his father, father-in-law and uncle died of heart disease, asthma and lung infection. None of them were entered into China's official COVID-19 death count. The Chinese government has been pushing out these lies in the public health data for decades. So they know how to fabricate the data. It's a longstanding practice in China's authoritarian one-party system. Officials set a target and forced the facts to fit the number. There are too many such cases in the past few decades. Scholars in public health, epidemiology and medicine, some of them have publicly accused the Chinese regime of covering up the facts. Over the last decades, Human Rights Watch has documented numerous instances of Beijing's censorship during other public health crisis. In the 2000s, hundreds of thousands of children were poisoned by lead. As China became known as the world's factory in the 2000s. Parents and journalists looking for information about that problem were harassed. In 2004, China suppressed information about a series of blood selling schemes. Reports estimated at least one million people got HIV from state-sponsored unsanitary blood-for-money programs. In 2008, Chinese media were banned from reporting on infants being poisoned by toxin-laced milk powder formula. Around 300,000 children were sickened and six died due to the poisoned milk. In 2018, Chinese authorities detained journalists, activists, lawyers and families of vaccine victims for exposing China's faulty vaccine problems. Critiques posted online were also censored. Once you tell a lie, you may have to tell more lies to cover it up. If you do that, people will know it's a lie and they won't believe you again. If the regime loses the hearts of the people, it will lose its rule so it can only keep lying and using its previous means. One of the biggest tragedies of modern history highlights this mindset, the famine that occurred between 1958 and 1962 in China. The most shocking part wasn't the death total, but that for over two decades, no one was sure whether it had even taken place. The Great Leap Forward led to three years of famine. Approximately at least 30 to 40 million people in the country starved to death at that time. At least 30 million people starved to death, a conclusion by American demographers in the mid-1980s. Even though so many people died of starvation, big cities like Beijing and Shanghai still have a lot of traffic on their streets. The information was very limited. That's because during that time, anyone who admitted there were food shortages were violently punished and declared enemies of socialism. Even today, there are still many missing pieces. In one instance, there is evidence that the Communist Party produced different versions of the same report and lower-ranking officials were given lower figures. This left Chinese authorities to believe that controlling the past is the key to the regime's future. So what about this time? How much damage did the COVID-19 cataclysm have on China? Who was to blame? How long will Beijing keep the true numbers secret? And will the actual death toll exceed expectations? Perhaps a more important question is, can the Chinese Communist Party get away with it this time? Now, more and more people are prepared, including the WHO, has now retracted some of its positive statements in the early, early days and pointed out the ways in which China has not cooperated particularly well. If the CCP or officials disagree with our calculation of a 380 million COVID-19 death toll, they are very welcome to respond with real Chinese demographic data. I think people inside China, there will be someone who has the courage to save the data, the true data. According to Lin, Chinese authorities have reportedly ordered hospitals to sync their data with China's CDC and the Public Health Commission. That means the two databases are very different. It implies that China's hospital system may keep a true record of how many people die and are hospitalized due to COVID-19. The truth may not be the right time for them to come to the public at this moment. Lin urges any medical professional with a conscience in China to step forward and tell the world what happened. And if anyone is able to do it, they must act now. Thank you for watching.