EXCLUSIVE: Death Toll Rises Nearly 6-Fold in Chinese City Amid COVID Wave, Internal Documents Show

Hospital workers and a relative wheel a body on a gurney out of the busy emergency room at a hospital in Beijing, China, on Jan. 2, 2023. Getty Images

On the road leading to a crematorium in China’s southern city of Nanjing where thick black smoke billows into the sky, the line of cars is so long that it isn’t clear where it ends.

On the curb squats a woman wearing a white mourning hat with her face buried in her hands, her cries piercing the air.