In Shanghai, following an increasingly unpopular very strict confinement (ban on going out even to buy food and complete isolation for people who test positive) as part of the zero Covid strategy of the Chinese health authorities, more and more discredited, bloggers and Internet users have called for transparency regarding the official number of deaths linked to Covid-19. Other Shanghainese undertake themselves to make a census of the number of dead and the exact cause of their death.
A fight for the truth about the Covid deaths
According to an article by Courrier International, several bloggers like Chen Donghua have asked on the Chinese social network WeChat that the Chinese authorities publish “concrete information on the deaths of positive cases [au Covid-19] in Shanghai”, precisely the date, the place and, if possible, the circumstances of the death. Their objective: to know the consequences of the confinement implemented in the Chinese metropolis since March 28.
This is also the objective of a group of volunteers who took the initiative to create, on Airtable, a page “List of the dead during the epidemic in Shanghai” in order, in particular, to collect testimonies on these deceased. “Airtable is an American cloud collaboration platform, allowing to count, analyze and collect data, based on the blockchain. The data therefore cannot be deleted”, explains the newspaper.
In addition to the paucity of information concerning the exact causes of death, the authors of the list point to the difference between the number of deaths communicated by the Shanghai Health Commission and the one they recorded, which is much higher.
“We therefore infer that the commission does not take into account the ‘collateral deaths [liés au Covid-19]’ such as suicide (like that of violinist Chen Shunping), an unknown cause of death (like in the case of Elaine, human resources manager of [l’entreprise américaine] Danaher) or sudden death by exhaustion (this is the case of several managers of co-ownership trustees), etc”, they underline.
In their system, volunteers assign a card to each deceased person with information such as address or circumstances of death. Card number 41, for example, records the death of “an elderly gentleman living alone who starved to death at his home in Huaxin Jiayuan, Xuhui District, Shanghai”.
Containment: more harmful than useful
More and more people are wondering about the “side effects” of Shanghai’s quarantine. Chen Gen, a writer specializing in science and technology, has spotted thousands of messages requesting help from the elderly, chronically ill, with cancer or undergoing hemodialysis. Given that the city is under quarantine, people in the provinces no longer have access to the medical care provided in Shanghai, which poses a real public health problem.
As we have reported on multiple occasions, the Covid-19 lockdown has been a highly controversial measure since its very first implementation. In January 2022, a scientific study from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University had brought a definitive conclusion to the question of the costs and benefits of this measure: little, if any, effect on mortality linked to Covid-19, but a disastrous economic and social cost.
See also: Lockdown measures had no effect on Covid mortality, Hopkins University finds
This time again, the official statistics provide no proof that confinement makes it possible to reduce the number of positive cases for Covid-19, as highlighted on April 24 on Twitter Hélène Banoun, pharmacist biologist and former researcher at INSERM.
Uselessness of containment if needed!
Shanghai: start of containment on March 21, followed by the (moderate!) explosion of cases pic.twitter.com/EzKa3bzakP— Hélène Banoun (@BanounHelene) April 24, 2022