Day: January 12, 2023

Guan Yao, who lives in California, never thought that on his last video chat with his grandmother in Beijing he would watch her die.

He had installed a tiny robot camera in his grandmother’s home some time ago so they could be in constant contact after he moved to the U.S. in 2016. She took to the device, holding it almost as if it provided the comfort of his touch.

Guan was video chatting with her throughout the last four hours of her life on December 22.

The 85-year-old had tested positive for COVID-19 and had had a fever for days. Two days before dying, she finally got a bed in a hospital.

Guan watched her blood oxygen saturation level suddenly turn from a low of 70 to a question mark. The doctor announced her death after an electrocardiogram.

“Her final death certificate said kidney failure because she had kidney disease before,” Guan told VOA Mandarin from his home in the Los Angeles area. “Not COVID.”

On the same day, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued an epidemic report stating that “there were no new deaths of COVID.”

Before his grandmother died, Guan, 39, an IT professional, had already lost four relatives in his extended family since December 14: his father-in-law, his father, an uncle and another elderly female relative. Among them, only Guan’s grandmother and uncle had tested positive for COVID-19. The others died before getting tested.

His father-in-law died of asthma. His father had heart disease and died in his sleep. His uncle’s medical images showed the white lungs associated with COVID-19 when he was sent to the hospital, but his death certificate states Parkinson’s disease as the cause.

China’s “zero-COVID” policy reversed almost overnight after three years on December 7, when the government issued the “New Ten Measures” for epidemic prevention that announced the relaxation of coronavirus-containment controls.

A tsunami-like COVID outbreak followed, its magnitude suggested by countless tragedies reported every day on social media despite China’s relentless internet censorship.

“The last day of 2022 ended with a funeral, and 2023 started with another funeral. In just half a month, the old people around here have been infected and died one after another. The sadness is lasting a bit too long,” wrote a poster from Jiangsu province.

“I work in a hospital, and I see people die every day. The crematorium works 24 hours every day, but people still have to wait in line,” wrote a poster from Guangdong.

Guan said, “The reopening was too sudden, prompting such a large-scale outbreak, and the medical system was completely unprepared for a large number of infection cases.”

Until January 7, the official death toll from COVID-19 remained at 30.

“The statistics are definitely underreported by a lot,” said Guan, a political activist who is a board member of Dialogue China, a nongovernmental think tank established by Tiananmen student leader Wang Dan. “My aunt said that she was in the emergency room and saw four or five people die and be carried away in such a short period of time.”

Tan Hua, who is in Shanghai and is infected with COVID-19, told VOA Mandarin that “we don’t have access to the official data now, and we don’t pay attention to the data on severe disease and death, because it’s completely inconsistent with how we feel around us.”

When Guan’s father died, the family found a one-stop service from the funeral home and spent about 30,000 yuan or roughly $4,400 to cremate him — twice the usual price. Without paying extra, they had to wait in a long queue.

When Guan’s grandmother died, the hospital said the government had a collective arrangement and that all the bodies would be stored in the funeral home, waiting for collective cremation.

An official notice informed the family that the morgues in hospitals and funeral homes were full and that local warehouses had been turned into temporary morgues until the collective cremation scheduled for January 19.

For unknown reasons, Guan said his grandmother’s body was not sent to the temporary morgue and was cremated on December 31.

Three years ago, when the pandemic broke out in Wuhan, Guan bought masks for his family in Beijing and told them not to believe the government. He thought they were spreading lies to cover up the pandemic. He never imagined that after three years of lockdown, China would witness death on such a scale.

“The three years [of lockdown] were meaningless,” Guan said. “It’s really unacceptable that so many loved ones have passed away. Whenever I think about it, I get really, really angry and sometimes I bang on the table at breakfast.”

When other overseas Chinese media approached Guan, hoping to interview him about the deaths in his family, he declined.

“I worried that they [the government] were going to do something under the rug,” he said. “My grandmother was such an important relative, and if she couldn’t be cremated because of my [media] appearance, my family would hate me for the rest of my life.”

Now that all five of his relatives have been cremated, Guan said that he doesn’t mind telling his story.

“Five relatives left in eight days. It’s too unusual. Someone has to tell the story,” he said.

The Lunar New Year arrives on January 22 this year. Guan’s father always spent New Year’s Eve with his mother, Guan’s grandmother. Being so far away across the Pacific Ocean, Guan would make video calls to his grandmother on the holiday, sharing New Year’s blessings, chatting about family affairs and making jokes.

This year, he keeps thinking of his grandmother who died not knowing that her only son had died three days before her.

“There is no one left home,” Guan said. “To be honest, there is nothing to celebrate this year.”

Hai Bao and Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
…

German police Thursday continued efforts to clear hundreds of climate protesters occupying the western village of Luetzerath to prevent the demolition of the town for the expansion of a coal mine.

Police began moving in Tuesday after a regional German court Monday rejected the last legal effort by the protesters to stop the demolition of the town located in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Utility company RWE wants to extract coal beneath Luetzerath, which it says is necessary to ensure energy security in Germany. The company reached a deal with the regional government last year that allows the village to be destroyed in return for ending coal use by 2030, rather than 2038.

But the protesters — some of whom have occupied the town for as long as two years — say bulldozing the village to expand the nearby Garzweiler coal mine would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. The government and the utility company argue that the coal is needed to ensure Germany’s energy security.

Though reports say many protesters have left voluntarily, there were reports of minor clashes with police that include rock throwing and fireworks. The Reuters news agency, quoting a local police spokesman, reported two people were detained and another three are in custody since the operation started.

Removing those who do not want to leave will not be an easy task, as the village has several houses and buildings where the protesters have holed up or have taken positions on rooftops.

A police press spokesperson told the French news agency AFP the operation “could last several weeks” with another demonstration planned for Saturday. High-profile figures, including Greta Thunberg, and other prominent climate campaigners are expected at the demonstration, lending reinforcements to the protesters.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 
…

For years, 51-year-old Rodney Stotts says he was living a dead-end life. Today, he is a different person, teaching young people about birds of prey and the importance of protecting the environment. Maxim Moskalkov has the story. Camera: Sergii Dogotar
…

The World Health Organization said Wednesday it is calling on China to provide more information about its surge in COVID-19 cases.

“WHO still believes that deaths are heavily underreported from China, and this is in relation to the definitions that are used but also to the need for doctors and those reporting in the public health system to be encouraged to report these cases and not discouraged,” Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies director, told reporters.

Ryan did praise China’s efforts to increase the number of designated beds in intensive care units and in using antivirals early in the course of treatment.

A lack of extensive data from China has led a number of countries to require testing for Chinese travelers.

“In the absence of data, countries have made a decision to take a precautionary approach and (WHO has) said that that is understandable in the circumstances,” Ryan said.

Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse. 
…

The race is on to save the ecologically crucial wetlands surrounding the final 160 kilometers of the Mississippi River, America’s most iconic waterway.

“We are losing our communities, our culture, our fisheries, and our first line of defense against the hurricanes that threaten us,” said Kim Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.

Adjacent to New Orleans, Plaquemines Parish is disappearing at an alarming rate. In recent decades, nearly 700 square kilometers of land have been consumed by the Gulf of Mexico because of the devastating combination of sinking land and rising sea levels. The parish includes wetlands that are home to thousands of Louisianans and many species of wildlife deemed critical to the ecology — and economy — of the region.

In December, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed off on the state’s ambitious $2.2 billion plan to divert sediment from the Mississippi River and, it is hoped, protect and restore the vanishing region, which contributes to Louisiana’s robust seafood and energy sectors.

“The most fortunate thing about the situation we find ourselves in,” Reyher told VOA, “is that we have the tools necessary to build more land by mimicking what the Mississippi River had done for millennia. We can make ourselves safer moving forward.”

That is what this plan hopes to do. But not everyone is convinced.

“They say this is a 50-year plan, but who of us is going to be around in 50 years?” asked Dean Blanchard, owner of Dean Blanchard Seafood in vulnerable Grand Isle, Louisiana, speaking with VOA. “They’ve been trying to build back land for decades and so far I haven’t seen them build enough for two of us to stand on. It just doesn’t work.”

Choking the muddy Mississippi

It wasn’t long ago in geological terms that what is now south Louisiana didn’t exist at all. The region is known as an alluvial delta, built over thousands of years as the country’s major rivers carried sediment from the Rocky Mountains in the west and deposited them into the Gulf of Mexico.

Over time, that process created land stretching from Gulf-facing Plaquemines Parish in the south to areas as far north as Baton Rouge, the state capital. New Orleans, a world-renowned hub of culture and tourism, also owes its existence to this sediment.

“But land down here sinks back into the Gulf unless it’s replenished with new sediment,” Reyher explained. “In the past, that replenishment would come from the seasonal overflowing of the muddy, sediment-rich Mississippi River. But, of course, no one wants to live in a place with annual flooding, so that’s why we built the levees.”

Those levees — barriers largely built in the 20th century on either bank of the river — have helped keep residents safe from river flooding.

But the levees also block the flow of new sediment, making the region more vulnerable to land loss due to erosion and rising sea levels. Ecologists project another 400 square kilometers of land could disappear by the end of the century.

But with the Army Corps’ approval of what is being called the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, some believe there is hope.

“We have been studying this for a very long time,” said Chip Kline, board chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which will be responsible for executing the plan.

“The project will mimic the pre-levee natural land building processes of the Mississippi River and strategically reconnect the river to our sediment-starved estuaries,” he said. “It will establish a consistent sediment source to nourish the newly created land in a way that provides a more sustainable solution than other options such as mechanical dredging.”

Doubt and outrage

The architects of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion believe this is the best available plan. They do, however, concede there will be consequences, particularly for the region’s fishermen, shrimpers and oyster harvesters.

“The water in which our oysters, shrimp and many of our fish thrive is salty,” local shrimper George Barisich told VOA. “So, when you divert all of this fresh Mississippi River water in there, it’s going to kill them. It’s going to destroy those fish populations for years and it’s going to destroy us fishermen.”

Even calling it fresh water, according to Barisich, is misleading.

“This isn’t the same water that traveled down the continent hundreds of years ago,” he said. “This now has pesticides and [feces] from every farm and household along the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) Mississippi River. It’s not going to build our wetlands; it’s going to destroy it.”

Although the project is backed by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, not everyone in state government is enthusiastic.

“I want what’s best for the people of Louisiana,” Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser told VOA, “and this isn’t it. We’ve tried building land his way before and it doesn’t work. The land gets washed away in six months because the Mississippi River doesn’t carry the same amount of sediment it did thousands of — or even a hundred — years ago.”

Mitigating consequences

Reyher, from the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, said she’s sympathetic to the concerns fishermen in the region have.

“This is going to impact them, we understand that,” she said. “That’s why we are including $360 million in the plan to assist them and mitigate those consequences.”

She continued: “But, if we do nothing, we’re admitting defeat. We’re talking about whole communities and millions of people that would eventually need to be relocated.”

Lieutenant Governor Nungesser said he also hopes to avoid that outcome. But he also says solutions need to be focused on the short term as well.

“We don’t have to sacrifice people now for some plan that we won’t know doesn’t work until 50 years down the road,” he said. “I’ve been a policymaker here for years, and we know what works. We have seen that specifically building up ridges and islands and berms that protect us from storms — that can keep us safe. And it can do it while protecting the culture and communities around Louisiana’s last surviving sacred resource — our seafood.”

Proponents of the project say the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion is the most effective and cost-efficient tool they have — a key component of a 50-year, $50 billion suite of solutions to save south Louisiana.

“Nothing like this has ever been done in the region,” Donald Boesch, professor of marine science at the University of Maryland, told VOA. “This project is designed to capture and distribute sediment during the times of year it is most available. And we can do it in a way that minimizes the water that will kill our fisheries while maximizing the … sediment that will save and re-establish south Louisiana.”

Louisiana must decide by February whether to accept or appeal the Army Corps’ permit conditions. The plan could draw lawsuits from opponents.
…