The sense of helplessness that has gripped the Chinese people on and off since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic three years ago is again returning as the country grapples with an unidentified pneumonia outbreak that is sickening children and overwhelming hospitals.

Sick children in strollers, or carried by their parents, have been filling hospital waiting rooms, hallways, and spilling outside the main gates. They wait for hours hoping for their number to be called on the loudspeaker before the day is over.

Waiting up to 12 hours is not uncommon—if one can get in line at all. After staying past midnight in a hospital hallway teeming with people, a Beijing resident shared a photo while holding a ticket number in the 1800s—the placement in the day’s queue—reminding would-be visitors to bring a stool with them, because “there’s nowhere to sit if you need to get an IV drip.”

From north to south, the spike in children’s respiratory hospitalizations is shutting classrooms and pushing health authorities to issue a flurry of announcements telling teachers and students who feel unwell to stay home.

Mr. Chen from Beijing told The Epoch Times that his daughter said, "Everyone in the class is coughing—you can't even hear what the teacher is saying."

Just like three years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears dismissive of the disease’s risk, telling a concerned World Health Organization that there are no “unusual or new pathogens” or clinical symptoms.

The regime partially attributed the uptick to a mid-October upgrade in a respiratory surveillance mechanism, and asserted that the existing Chinese hospital capacities have been sufficient to handle the situation.

Beijing’s explanation, which the international health agency as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have quoted verbatim, has convinced few in China or abroad.

The acting director of WHO’s department of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, Maria Van Kerkhove, said in a Nov. 29 press briefing that the organization is “following up with the situation in China” and assessing “the health care capacities around the world” in dealing with these types of new infections.

Sean Lin, microbiologist and former lab director at the viral diseases branch of Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, expressed frustration over the WHO’s reliance on China’s regime for information.

“How can you trust the Chinese government data?” he told The Epoch Times.

After whistleblower doctors sounded the alarm on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan during the final days of 2019, it took nearly three weeks before the Chinese regime acknowledged that the virus can spread from human to human. During that time, and afterward, authorities reprimanded the medics who spoke out, arrested citizen journalists, and muzzled reporters, while orchestrating an internet cleanup on any mention of the outbreak deemed undesirable to its image.

Many lawmakers in Washington, especially Republicans, see the same thing happening in China now.

“We have no ability to trust the Chinese,” Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), told The Epoch Times’ sister outlet NTD on Nov. 30, a day after signing a letter demanding that the CDC investigate the outbreak in China.

“They're not forthcoming, they don't want to lose face, and as a result, people die.”

Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a practicing surgeon, similarly believes “China's going to do everything possible so that they don't look like they're the genesis of another pandemic.”

“I don't trust anything the Chinese say—not a word,” he told NTD. “You get burned once, you don't get burned again.”

A Fast Spreading Pathogen

Around this time last year the regime abruptly abandoned its draconian zero-COVID restrictions after forcing the Chinese population to live for years in an on-again, off-again lockdown with food and other basic needs hanging in the balance.

In the first 20 days of December 2022, an estimated hundreds of millions contracted the virus and the influx of infections and deaths overloaded hospitals and crematoriums.

During the current pneumonia outbreak, children have been particularly hard hit. Major Chinese pediatric hospitals across China have reported receiving up to 10,000 patients each day in recent weeks.

The Tianjin Children’s Hospital hit a daily record of 13,171 patients recently. The hospital's director, Liu Wei, penned a letter pleading for understanding from the public, emphasizing that the medical workers are also parents, some with their own sick children.

Other health workers from the northeastern megacity confirmed the same pattern is repeating throughout Tianjin if not elsewhere. Going to the doctor at a hospital, for many Chinese, means waiting in the wee hours of the morning in front of their computer screen to secure a placement number, which is limited daily.

“Even when our children get sick, we also have trouble getting a number. We also have to keep refreshing the screen to see if a number becomes available,” one Beichen Hospital staff member told The Epoch Times. Further north, in Jilin Province, a staff member from the Second Hospital of Jilin University said the hospital was booked for the next seven days.

In some hospitals, the waiting rooms were so packed that children and their families had to line up outside the hospital gate. Tents, camping beds, foldable chairs, and blankets were all put into use, while those needing intravenous treatment brought hangers and lifting hooks to self-administer an IV during the wait.

Feeling the pressure, authorities in the northern Chinese city of Sanhe have dispatched workers in hazmat suits to sanitize campuses. A man from Beijing, Mr. Liu, told The Epoch Times that the hospital he was staying in had put out a mask mandate and limited family visits to a two-hour window each evening.

People in the thick of it speak uneasily of how fast, and persistent, the disease has been taking hold.

On Chinese social media site Weibo, an elementary school teacher from southern China’s Hunan Province shared how the entire class fell sick overnight and stayed home. The teacher also called in sick after a night of head-splitting high fever, hand tremors, ringing in ears, and a dry cough that brought sharp lung pain.

A Beijing mother of two, whose entire family recently suffered from the disease, referred to a local school in which half of the students became afflicted despite all the precautionary measures.

“There’s not much you can do,” she told The Epoch Times. “Mask up and cover yourself as much as you like, you get infected all the same.”

It’s also hard to completely shake it, she added. Days after the coughing and sneezing ceased, a student believed to have recovered became feverish again.

Even by the numbers from Chinese authorities, who have a persistent record of playing down unflattering data, the image is dire: Beijing alone reported over 72,000 infections in the week ending Nov. 26.

“China's the number one purveyor of lies and deceit. Luckily, they've clearly been unable to cover this up thus far,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), told NTD.

Five Republican senators on Dec. 1 wrote to President Joe Biden urging him to restrict travel between the United States and China to buy time to study the dangers of the illness.

“A ban on travel now could save our country from death, lockdowns, mandates, and further outbreaks later,” the senators wrote.

Downplaying the Outbreak

The statistics released by the Beijing Municipal Health Commission are so far the only data point to gauge the severity of the current outbreak.

It pinpointed 16 infection sources, among them flu and mycoplasma—a bacteria that can cause respiratory infections and pneumonia—echoing the official rhetoric that sources other than COVID-19 are to blame for the spiraling patient numbers.

Chinese state media have spent the past month attempting to reassure the public the outbreak is but a routine winter spike of common respiratory pathogens and there’s little need to panic.

The Communist Party’s official mouthpiece People’s Daily carried an article saying that mycoplasma pneumonia is “preventable and controllable,” phrases that the regime had used in January 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak in China began to draw international anxiety.

But the focus on mycoplasma might be a deliberate step to mislead and detract, according to Mr. Lin, the virologist.

“The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want the international society to suspect that China is suffering another COVID wave,” he said, calling the emphasis on common pathogens “purely political.”

“There's so many common respiratory pathogens and the government can hold any of them to blame—but it's not the real picture," he said.

Multiple questions arise from the Chinese authorities’ narrative that the illness is likely mycoplasma pneumonia.

Mycoplasma typically spreads over a prolonged period through droplets, according to the CDC, which says most people “do not get infected” when spending a short amount of time with the infected.

The disease is so mild that it doesn’t even make it to the 59 types of notifiable diseases on China’s CDC website.

Unlike COVID-19, mycoplasma doesn’t lead to “white lung syndrome”—when lung areas show up white on chest X-rays due to fluid buildup—that has been plaguing Chinese children recently, noted Dong Yuhong, an infectious disease analyst with 12 years of experience at Swiss multinational pharmaceutical Novartis.

Nor has any past respiratory disease season reached the scale China is now grappling with. A doctor from Anhui Provincial Children's Hospital, a national medical center, told Chinese media that his hospital has been performing an average of 50 “lung washing” procedures daily for infected children who have serious lung complications, up from roughly 10 a day in normal periods. The most they have treated is 67 cases in one day.

Conventional treatment methods for mycoplasma pneumonia haven’t worked either. A pediatric doctor who got sick told The Epoch Times she has taken “every possible drug for mycoplasma pneumonia, but none proved effective.”

COVID-19, Mr. Lin said, is probably still the driving force behind the current wave.

Most likely, he said, “some of the other respiratory pathogens destroyed their upper respiratory defense mechanism, so now COVID just goes straight in.”

Children may be the first group to take the hit, he said, but infections have also spread to adults.

Still striking an overall positive tone, Chinese media reports appear to be adjusting their message to lower expectations. A People’s Daily article dated Nov. 27 cited multiple experts who stated that there’s no “miracle drug” for upper respiratory illnesses.

Absent of effective pharmaceutical cures, Beijing’s hospitals have been in a race to open departments offering traditional Chinese medical treatments. A hospital in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong is hiring experienced pediatricians in the face of the throngs of coughing children showing up at their doors.

Yiwu, a city in east China, sent another distress signal: it called for everyone—from government to workplaces and schools, to store up to 15 days of food, triggering worries of an impending lockdown.

Censorship

COVID-19 is the still the elephant in the room.

As Xi Jinping prepared for his recent visit to San Francisco to sell China as a friendly market for foreign investors, he personally ordered officials to gloss over the gravity of the outbreak and make the case that a COVID mutation isn’t the cause so that international visitors wouldn’t be scared away, a whistleblower close to the central Party leadership in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai and the Chinese military told The Epoch Times.

In that spirit, Chinese state media are only allowed to promote health tips directed at children, but not adults, the person said.

The regime is now giving six countries in Europe and Asia visa-free entry in a bid to boost tourism, which had plummeted due to the stringent zero-COVID policy.

In the northeastern province of Jilin, a woman whose son displayed white lung symptoms and was diagnosed with mycoplasma pneumonia said a doctor she was acquainted with told her that COVID was the main cause.

“It has mutated and can’t be detected through testing,” the woman, Ms. Li, told NTD. “It’s just the government doesn’t allow people to talk about it.”

Ms. Jin, of central China’s Xi’an City, heard the same from her hospitalized nephew: the doctor told him that he had COVID.

“They just called it by a different name,” she told The Epoch Times, relaying the doctor’s words.

It’s the same playbook that the regime followed a year ago at the height of the devastating COVID wave in December 2022. Beijing tweaked the criteria for classifying COVID deaths, counting only those dying of COVID or respiratory failure and excluding anyone with underlying conditions.

People involved in issuing death certificates, including multiple doctors, told The Epoch Times said they were ordered not to mention COVID.

“Write whatever cause, just not COVID,” one worker at a residential neighborhood in northeastern city Changchun told The Epoch Times at the time. On a death certificate for a local police station director’s father-in-law who died at home, she put down “brain stroke.”

If COVID was specified in the paperwork, hospitals, which need to process the bodies of those who died at home, won’t accept it, the worker said.

In some areas, even a public mention of sickness is taboo. At least two parents from Beijing and Tianjin told The Epoch Times that teachers have instructed parents not to mention their children’s sickness in the school chat groups for fear of “negatively impacting others.”

“Everything is a national secret,” Mr. Wei, from Beijing, told The Epoch Times.

Historical Pattern

If the three-year pandemic has offered any guide, it is that the current scientific knowledge is far too limited to predict the future, Mr. Lin said.

“We need to be very humble in front of the power of nature,” he said, adding that he believes it’s time to go beyond conventional public health perspectives to reflect on “what's wrong in society and any fundamental ways to improve.”

He isn’t the only one taking a holistic approach.

Spiritual practice Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, in late August told The Epoch Times that the virus targets the CCP and those who blindly follow the Party and defend it.

Plagues and pestilence, Mr. Li wrote in a March 2020 essay titled “Rationality,” are aimed “at the decay of the human heart and morality as well as the massive build-up of karma.”

He advises people to “Stay far away from the evil CCP and don’t align with the evil Party.”

Jonathan Liu, a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner in Ontario, compared the current China to the waning days of successive ancient imperial dynasties, where destructive plagues decimated the population and loosened the rulers’ control.

Epidemics were breaking out every two or three years around the last three decades of the Eastern Han Dynasty, which was also accompanied by large-scale rebellions and fighting among military factions.

The largest one, which happened three years before the Han empire collapsed, saw people dying off by clans, and virtually every household was in mourning, according to writings by Cao Zhi, an accomplished poet and the son of one of the top three warlords of the time.

“Traditional Chinese culture emphasizes the oneness between man and Heaven,” Mr. Liu told The Epoch Times. “When people become morally corrupt, disasters follow. This is how the ancients look at this through the lens of retribution.”

China has had no shortfall of issues over the last few years. Pandemic aside, a series of droughts and historic-scale flooding have destroyed crops, compounding fears of a food shortage.

With tourism down, the property sector in turmoil, and a growing foreign investment exodus, Beijing is deprived of its usual levers to relieve a faltering economy, while an all-time-high youth jobless rate is posing a political risk. Tensions with the United States haven’t helped.

Over its century of existence, the communist party in China has thrived on violence and deceit, with a history of bloody political infighting and human rights suppression that has resulted in the death of tens of millions of Chinese.

The regime has deployed increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies to monitor the Chinese populace, erasing, in near real time, any murmurs of dissent on and offline. But its control on the public appears to be waning.

In a series of sporadic protests that erupted in November 2022, young Chinese nationwide fed up with the regime’s seemingly endless lockdowns took to the streets, and for the first time, called for the ruling party’s downfall.

Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas) considers such gestures more than symbolic.

“It shows where the people are, right?” he told NTD.

“Wherever in the world, you want your life, you want to have choices. That's what they're standing up for against the regime in China.”

Luo Ya and Li Shanshan contributed to this report.