CHINESE celebrities are dying at an alarming rate amid fears the Covid ravaged country could be suffering up to 16,000 deaths every day from the virus.
Daily infection rates are estimated to be up to 2.5million as the Chinese government has been accused of "underrepresenting" recent outbreaks.
Global health analytics company Airfinity released their estimated cumulative cases in China thus far - 33million.
And they estimated the death toll could be up to 16,000 people a day, with 209,000 deaths since December 1.
A number of deaths of prominent Chinese celebrities have also fuelled suspicions that the Communist Party is not being honest about severity of the virus.
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It comes as China dropped its highly unpopular"Covid Zero" policy in early December.
The strategy was championed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and saw some of the world's strictest lockdowns.
But after a wave of protests - China made a dramatic U-turn.
And they have since has narrowed the criteria for what could be classified as a Covid death.
New guidelines state only fatalities "caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure in patients who had the virus" will be classified as Covid deaths.
But a recent wave of celebrity deaths after the "Covid Zero" policy was lifted have left many questioning what the real figures are in relation to the Covid crisis.
In Shanghai, Kehua Bio-Engineering Group announced that its founder Tang Weiguo, 66, died of Covid and underlying conditions on Christmas day.
Chinese sitcom star Gong Jintang died on New Years Day, but his cause of death has not been released.
In December, opera star Chu Lanlan died at 39, of an undisclosed "illness".
Wang Tao, 52, a deputy dean at Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, died of Covid on December 30.
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Thousands of obituaries and death announcements across the country seem to contradict the narrative the Chinese government is putting into the world.
A quote from a Chinese health official which reads: “the first Covid wave did not cause a massive amount of deaths” is going viral as a hashtag on Weibo.
One user said: “Whether it is academicians or celebrities … or my relatives and friends in close contact, I really feel many people have died, but experts keep saying that was not the case."
Chinese Weibo users are questioning the underestimated death toll, and the hashtag has more than 220m views as of today.
The World Health Organisation's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: "We continue to ask China for more rapid, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing.
"WHO is concerned about the risk to life in China and has reiterated the importance of vaccination, including booster doses, to protect against hospitalization, severe disease, and death."
The R number, which indicates the transmissibility of the virus is a massive 16, scientists at the China National Health Commission estimated in late December.
That means an each person infected will spread the disease on to about 16 others.
Reports of bodies lining hospital hallways and crematoriums running 24 hours a day have already been going viral online.
Dr Feigl-Ding is chief of the Covid Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute and one of the first scientists to warn about the ability of Covid to spread when he worked at Harvard.
According to Feigl-Ding, many Chinese hospitals even “top-level” ones in the capital Beijing are “running out of oxygen”.
If transmission without social distancing continues, one group estimates as many as half a million deaths by April.
