In China’s Covid Fog, Deaths of Scholars Offer a Clue

We reviewed obituaries published over the past four years by the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the state-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Academy members, who hail from research institutions across the country, help shape national policy and shape research priorities. The engineering academy currently has about 900 members and the science academy about 800, according to their website.

The obituaries did not specify the scholar’s cause of death other than “illness,” and the academies did not respond to requests for more specifics. But the spike late last year coincided with the rapid spread of the coronavirus across the country.

Infections began to increase in the fall, despite China’s strict “Covid-free” mass testing and blockade policy. Then, after the government abruptly abandoned the policy in early December, amid a struggling economy and protests in many cities, cases skyrocketed.

During those tumultuous times, hospitals turned away patients and Funeral home sprawled below body number. However, the government’s accounting did not reflect those tragic scenes – for weeks it reported only three dozen deaths – and it has been widely criticized for its lack of transparency.

The government has release more data in recent weeks, say it records about 80,000 won death since it lifted Covid restrictions. However, many experts say that number may be an understatement, as it only includes those who died in hospitals; Some have estimated that the death toll in China could exceed 1 million in the coming months.

On Chinese social media, users have pointed to the skyrocketing number of obituaries published by places like two academies, to show that the true death toll is much higher than the official figure. .

Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, said any count is likely to be incomplete as the government has largely abandoned Covid testing, including in hospitals. “The reality is that even the government may not know everything,” he said.

“It is the job of the government” to collect and share accurate information, Dr. Jin continued. “But they don’t do their job.”

Those killed included molecular biologists, nuclear physicists and agricultural chemists. An academy member, Ma Jianzhang, 86 years old, is a wildlife scientist who studies Siberian tigers. He helped establish the country’s only university of wildlife and nature reserve, and led groups including the Zoological Society of China and the China Wildlife Conservation Society. Country.

Contacted by phone, a relative of Professor Ma said that she did not know if he had Covid because he had not been tested. He had other underlying illnesses, she added.

“To the outside world, he can be a person of great achievement or influence,” said one relative, Fu Qun. “For our family, he is more important as a spiritual leader. We all have great respect for him.”

The data drawn from the obituaries is far from conclusive. The institutions also did not respond to questions about whether the obituaries — both during the outbreak and before — were informative about all of the dead scholars.

However, obituaries published by other organizations showed similar spikes in late December and early January.

Between 2019 and 2021, Harbin Institute of Technology, one of the top engineering schools in the world, published between one and three obituaries to professors and staff during those months. From December to last month, it announced 29 deaths.

The non-public university-wide obituary for Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious universities. But some individual departments have published obituaries for their own professors and staff.

Those killed included Luo Xiaochun, 68, the former director of the library of the Foreign Languages ​​Department; Zhao Binghua, 91 years old, founder of the nursing school of Peking University, who remembered juggling housework and taking care of two kids as a pediatrician in the 1960s; and Guo Xiliang, 93 years old, a linguist who has continue publishing his book on Old Chinese phonetics in the 90s.

According to Zhang Meng, a former student and professor’s colleague at Peking University, Professor Guo was infected with the corona virus when he died.

In December, both Peking University and Tsinghua University, another top school in Beijing, grant Notification calls for more protection for retired faculty and staff.

Chinese health officials have said that peak outbreak in late December and those cases are dwindling. But the country has yet to solve many of the fundamental problems in its health system, such as ineffective vaccines and insufficient hospital beds, said Professor Jin in Hong Kong.

“That means, even if you have very small spikes in the future, there will still be more deaths,” he said. “If they don’t learn their lesson, that will be the new situation.”