China faces a 'thermonuclear' wave of Covid with a million dead, experts have been left fearing.
Boffins have been left worried that the Asian country is facing a health apocalypse, after a video has been captured showing Covid-ravaged hospitals the capital of Beijing, with wheelchair-bound patients just metres away from corpses.
The decision, experts say, to stick with the tough zero-Covid draconian restrictions is to blame for the 'thermonuclear' Covid wave that could kill up to one million people.
There are grave concerns that the country will see 800 million cases in just 90 days.
It comes just weeks after the ruling Communist Party began dismantling the deeply unpopular policies, despite rolling out vaccines.
This hermit-like strategy has left China's population with little to no natural immunity among the country's 1.4billion population, as experts believe the virus is running rampant.
Therefore, reportedly, that there could be up to one million deaths into the new year.
And with vaccination rates far lower in China than the West, immunologists predict that up to 60 per cent of the country will get infected between now and March.
But while Chinese officials haven't reported on any Covid-related deaths in the country since December 4, official figures show Covid cases fell 47 per cent to 4,666 this month.
A harrowing clip, which has gone viral on Chinese social media, appears to show patients waiting at Beijing Chuiyangliu Hospital on December 21, while they are placed next to dead bodies at the overcrowded hospital.
In the footage, a patient in a face mask lies slumped in a wheelchair next to a corpse on a hospital bed covered in a white sheet, while another covered body lies on a stretcher on the floor.
The camera then pans to show a packed-out hospital corridor, with patients on stretchers and in wheelchairs all crammed together.
The caption for the video reads: "On December 21, at Beijing Chuiyangliu Hospital, some corpses were not transported away, so they were placed in the same room as the patients in the emergency room!"
Other photos from a different hospital, the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, show an elderly Covid patient lying on a stretcher at the emergency ward as they seem to be in pain.
Meanwhile, another image - from the same university hospital - shows patients lying in close proximity to one another as doctors crowd around them.
And a third picture shows emergency health workers transporting a Covid patient to a fever clinic at a hospital in Beijing yesterday, as people stand outside, crowing around a door.
Dr Feigl-Ding, chief of the Covid Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute, was one of the first scientists to warn the world about how Covid spreads when he worked at Harvard.
He took to Twitter to write: "THERMONUCLEAR BAD — Hospitals completely overwhelmed in China ever since restrictions dropped.
"Epidemiologist estimate >60% of [China] & 10% of Earth’s population likely infected over next 90 days. Deaths likely in the millions—plural. This is just the start."
Previously, he pointed to predictions by China’s own health officials that 60 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion population could become infected.
Fellow epidemiologist Ben Cowling from the University of Hong Kong has also gone on to agree with the chilling prediction, saying: "This surge is going to come very fast, unfortunately. That's the worst thing.
"If it was slower, China would have time to prepare. But this is so fast. In Beijing, there's already a load of cases and [in] other major cities because it's spreading so fast."
Meanwhile, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus yesterday said: "WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China, with increasing reports of severe disease."
