Cremations in one of China’s most populous provinces surged by 72.7% year-on-year in the first quarter, local media reported, providing a rare insight into the scale of mortality due to the government’s sudden relaxation of coronavirus restrictions in December.

There were 171,000 cremations registered in the eastern province of Zhejiang in the first quarter, well above the 99,000 in the same period in year before, Chinese financial media outlet Caixin reported, citing official data released by the province. The official statement was later removed from the internet, according to Caixin.

Most people who die in China are cremated, with burials banned in some areas.

China had achieved a high vaccination rate in the general population before coronavirus restrictions were suddenly dropped in December, resulting in a wave of hundreds of millions of cases. However, the vaccination rate among the elderly was relatively low, likely resulting in a wave of mortality.

It is unknown how many people actually died from Covid during the exit wave that began late last year as the country abandoned its attempt to stop all infection. The government reported that there were nearly 60,000 Covid-related deaths in the first five weeks of that outbreak.

However, that number was widely seen as an underestimate because the government narrowed the criteria for classifying deaths caused by Covid-19 late last year. An estimate in January by Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles, put the number of deaths at about 900,000 in those five weeks.

That wave of infections peaked in January. Nationwide cremation figures for the fourth quarter of 2022 were unexpectedly omitted from an annual report by China’s civil affairs ministry which usually discloses the data, the South China Morning Post reported. Caixin said that Zhejiang also did not disclose the cremation data for the fourth quarter of 2022.

Although Zhejiang province deleted the first quarter data from its website, Caixin cited an unnamed local government official as saying that “some” of the deleted data was accurate and that cremations increased mainly because of the coronavirus.

Caixin reported that the cremation numbers for the first quarters of 2020 and 2021 were 88,300 and 93,000 respectively. That implies that cremations in the first quarter of this year were 83% above the three-year average for period.

There were 1.7 million cremations nationwide in the first three months of 2022, but differences between provinces in demographics, healthcare and vaccination rates mean it would be difficult to estimate a nationwide death rate from one province’s data. Zhejiang borders Shanghai and is one of China’s wealthiest provinces, and it also has one of the country’s most elderly populations.

Death data was also questioned during China’s first outbreak, which was bought under control by strict lockdowns in early 2020. The government reported that about 5,000 people died in the initial outbreak in the city of Wuhan and the surrounding province of Hubei in late 2019 and early 2020.

Because of a lack of availability of testing for the virus at the time, that is likely to be an underestimate. A study by researchers from the University of Oxford and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention which was published in the British Medical Journal found about 6000 excess deaths in Wuhan in January-March 2020.

--With assistance from Li Liu.