Funeral homes and crematoriums in Beijing are extremely busy as the number of deaths increased significantly amid a recent flare-up of Covid-19 in China’s capital. The communist regime eased its stringent zero-Covid measures on December 7. Those employees infected by Covid-19 have to keep working, as the earliest open cremation slot is December 20, an employee of Babaoshan Crematorium told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on December 14. “We are very busy every day; we have never been so busy before. Calls keep flooding in and we don’t have any time to take a break.” A netizen using the name @xz1999999 uploaded a video clip on Twitter, showing a long queue of hearses reportedly waiting to enter the Babaoshan Crematorium. Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that in Beijing there are 12 funeral parlours with a total of 90 furnaces. A typical cremation takes 25 to 40 minutes. If all 90 furnaces operate around the clock across the city, potentially, over 3,000 cremations occur every day. Yet, staffers of funeral homes said they were “operating with several days of backlog.”
