China officially reported on Monday its first Covid-related deaths since the government began dismantling strict anti-virus controls earlier this month, feeding anxiety that this could be the start of a grim trend as the virus rips through the country.

Monday’s two deaths were the first to be reported by the National Health Commission (NHC) since December 3, days before Beijing announced it was abandoning curbs, which had largely kept the virus in check for three years but triggered widespread protests last month.

Though on Saturday, a Reuters journalist in Beijing saw hearses bearing dead lining the driveway to a designated Covid-19 crematorium, and about 20 yellow body bags containing corpses on the floor of an adjacent funeral parlour. Reuters could not immediately establish if the deaths were due to Covid-19.

Meanwhile, people with Covid-19 symptoms in Chongqing, one of China’s largest cities, can now go to work “as normal”, state media reported on Monday.

Covid deaths

Officially, China has suffered just 5,237 Covid-related deaths during the pandemic, including the latest two fatalities, a tiny fraction of its 1.4 billion population and very low by global standards.

The NHC also reported 1,995 symptomatic infections for December 18, compared with 2,097 a day earlier.

It stopped reporting asymptomatic cases last week citing a drop in mandatory PCR testing after China’s policy shift.

And there is growing doubt that China’s data is capturing the fast worsening situation on the ground.

A hashtag on the two reported Covid-19 deaths quickly became the top trending topic on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform on Monday morning.

“What is the point of incomplete statistics?” asked one user. “Isn’t this cheating the public?” wrote another.

Workers at a dozen funeral homes in Beijing told Reuters on Saturday that they were busier than normal.

Respected Chinese news outlet Caixin on Friday reported that two state media journalists had died after contracting Covid-19, and then on Saturday that a 23-year-old medical student had also died. It was not immediately clear which, if any, of these deaths were included in official death tolls.

The NHC did not immediately respond to questions from Reuters on the accuracy of its data.

Now, as the world’s most populous nation unwinds years of hardline coronavirus policy, with Covid-19 spreading rapidly in the wake of the official end of mass lockdowns, testing and quarantines, authorities admit the outbreak is “impossible” to track.

Megacity allows symptomatic Covid patients to work ‘as normal’

Meanwhile, the southern megacity of Chongqing — home to around 32 million people — has become one of the first parts of China to let people work normally even with visible symptoms, the Chongqing Daily reported on Monday, citing a notice from municipal authorities.

The notice, issued on Sunday, said that “mildly symptomatic” government, party and state workers “can work as normal after undertaking personal protections in accordance with their physical conditions and needs of their jobs”.

It also urged residents not to take virus tests “unnecessarily” or require people to show a negative result, with exceptions for certain facilities such as care homes, schools and prisons.

On Sunday, eastern Zhejiang province — a major economic hub home to more than 60 million people — said those with mild symptoms could “continue to work, if need be, on the prerequisite of taking personal protections”.

Local governments across China have generally encouraged people to isolate at home while recovering from the disease — a dramatic shift from the previous policy of herding people into state quarantine facilities.

Vaccination

As China moves to align with a world that has largely opened up in an effort to live with the virus, it may now pay a price for shielding a population that lacks natural immunity and has low vaccination rates among the elderly, health experts say.

Some say China’s Covid-19 death toll may rise above 1.5 million in the coming months.

In the Shijingshan district of Beijing, medical workers have been going door-to-door offering to vaccinate elderly residents in their homes, China’s Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.

Officially, China’s vaccination rate is above 90 per cent, but the rate for boostered adults drops to 57.9pc, and to 42.3pc for people aged 80 and above, according to government data.

But it is not just the elderly that are wary of vaccines in China.

“I don’t trust it,” Candice, a 28-year old headhunter in Shenzhen told Reuters, citing stories from friends about health impacts, as well as similar health warnings on social media. Candice spoke on condition that only her first name be used.

Overseas-developed vaccines are unavailable in mainland China to the general public, which has relied on inactivated shots by local manufacturers for its vaccine rollout.

While China’s medical community in general doesn’t doubt the safety of China’s vaccines, some say questions remain over their efficacy compared to foreign-made mRNA counterparts.