In China, one celebrity dies after another. As a result, there is a lot of speculation on the largest social media channel, Weibo, about the cause. According to official figures, not a single corona death has occurred in China for weeks, but many doubt that.
A well-known opera singer, a film director, and some popular actors: suddenly, one celebrity after another seems to die in China. Much Chinese fear that many of those deaths are due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus.
According to the official figures, there have been virtually no deaths from the coronavirus’s consequences in recent weeks. However, there is a lot of speculation on Chinese social media channels that the real number of corona deaths could be higher than what the “official figures” claim.
One of the dead is actor Gong Jintang. The 83-year-old actor starred in one of China’s longest-running television series, “In-Laws, Out-Laws”. The show, in which he played father Kang, kept many Chinese viewers glued to the screen for over two decades. The actor was already of some age, but many Chinese still suspect that the actor died of the consequences of the coronavirus.
The unexpected passing of soprano Chu Lanlan (40) also causes a great deal of suspicion. She performed at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. According to the College of Opera Arts in Beijing, the institute where she taught, she died of an illness.
Then there are acclaimed film director Wang Jingguang (54), famous screenwriter Ni Zhen (84), retired soccer star Wang Ruoji (37), journalist and professor Hu Fuming (87), actor Fu Zucheng (82) and 16 leading scientists.
They also died in recent weeks. But, of course, that is very coincidental; many Chinese speculate on social media especially since the cause of death is not mentioned in their obituaries or is only vaguely described.
Haishang Yilanghua, an influencer on the Chinese social media platform Weibo with hundreds of thousands of followers, believes that “these deaths have been publicized, but many ordinary people have also suffered and died, and those details are not known”. As a result, many Chinese are now questioning the “official corona numbers”.
According to those figures, there have been virtually no casualties in China from the consequences of the coronavirus. That is strange because several Western scientists believe infections have never been so high.
According to various studies by the Chinese Center for Disease Control, Fudan University, the British research company Airfinity and the American Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, up to 2 million people in China could die from the effects of the coronavirus in the coming months.
The main reason for this remains the limited vaccination coverage in the elderly population and the low immunity. Geert Molenbergs, a biostatistician at Hasselt University and KU Leuven, also confirms this. “Many people with us have been infected with the coronavirus up to three times, so we have built up a certain defensive wall. They don’t have that in China.”
