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

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

The academies’ members, who are drawn from research institutions across the country, help shape national policy and steer research priorities. The engineering academy currently has about 900 members, and the science academy about 800, according to their websites.

The obituaries did not specify the scholars’ causes of death beyond “illness,” and the academies did not answer requests for more specifics. But the spike late last year coincided with the coronavirus’s rapid spread across the country.

Infections had already begun rising in the fall, despite China’s strict “zero Covid” policy of lockdowns and mass testing. Then, after the government suddenly abandoned the policy in early December, amid a flailing economy and protests in multiple cities, cases soared.

During that chaotic period, hospitals turned away patients and funeral homes staggered under the number of bodies. The government’s accounting, however, did not reflect those tragic scenes — for weeks it reported just three dozen deaths — and it drew widespread criticism for a lack of transparency.

The government has released more data in recent weeks, saying it recorded about 80,000 deaths since it lifted Covid restrictions. Still, many experts say that figure is likely an undercount, as it includes only people who died in hospitals; some have estimated that the death toll in China could exceed 1 million people in the coming months.

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

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

“It’s the government’s job” to gather and share accurate information, Dr. Jin continued. “But they’re not doing their job.”

The deceased included molecular biologists, nuclear physicists and experts in agricultural chemistry. One academy member, Ma Jianzhang, 86, was a wildlife scientist who specialized in Siberian tigers. He helped establish the country’s only college for wildlife and nature reserves, and led groups including the China Zoological Society and the China Wildlife Conservation Association.

Reached by phone, a relative of Professor Ma said that she did not know whether he had contracted Covid, because he had not been tested. He had other underlying diseases, she added.

“To the outside world, he may be someone with great achievements or influence,” the relative, Fu Qun, said. “To our family, he was more important as a sort of spiritual leader. We all respected him very much.”

The data drawn from the obituaries are far from conclusive. The institutions also did not answer questions about whether the obituaries — both during the outbreak and before — were exhaustive of all scholars who had died.

Still, obituaries published by other institutions showed similar spikes in late December and early January.

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

University-wide obituaries were not publicly available for Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious. But some individual departments published obituaries for their own professors and staff.

Those who died included Luo Xiaochun, 68, a former director of the library for the Foreign Languages department; Zhao Binghua, 91, a founder of Peking University’s nursing school, who had recalled juggling housework and care for her two children with her duties as a pediatrician in the 1960s; and Guo Xiliang, 93, a linguist who had continued publishing books on ancient Chinese phonetics into his 90s.

Professor Guo had been infected with the coronavirus when he died, according to Zhang Meng, a former student and colleague of the professor at Peking University.

In December, both Peking University and Tsinghua University, another top-ranked school in Beijing, issued notices urging greater protection for retired faculty and staff.

Chinese health officials have said that the outbreak peaked in late December and that cases are steadily declining. But the country has still not addressed many of the underlying issues in its health system, such as less effective vaccines and insufficient hospital beds, said Professor Jin, in Hong Kong.

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