RFA noted that it could not independently verify that the Chinese Communist Party was burning coronavirus patients alive, nor has the Communist Party confirmed or denied the rumors. Yet the rumors persist that, to make room for new patients in Wuhan’s overcrowded hospitals, medical staff chose older patients less likely to survive the infection and shipped them to incinerators while they were still alive and conscious.

RFA quoted a source “close to the funeral industry” identified only as Ma who said that he had heard reports of “people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving.”

“Some people are saying that … there are video clips of screams coming from funeral homes, from inside the furnaces … which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive,” Ma added.

Ma also noted the existence of video testimony from an anonymous older woman who had been treated at a Wuhan hospital, presumably for Chinese coronavirus.

“One old lady was saying that they put one guy into … a body bag when he wasn’t even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him,” Ma told RFA.

Video of an older woman speaking anonymously to a camera began circulating on social media in February in which she said she witnessed a patient next to her at a Wuhan hospital stuffed into a body bag while still alive.

“He’s not dead, his feet and hands are still moving,” the woman says, “[They] wrapped him in a plastic body bag and zipped it up.”

According to New Tang Dynasty, a broadcaster affiliated with the persecuted Chinese Falun Gong movement, the woman spoke with a Wuhan accent, suggesting she was a native of the central Chinese city.

The Taiwanese outlet Taiwan News traced the origin of the video to a Chinese student group called “Youth Production,” who reportedly uploaded the video on February 24. Taiwan News noted that the woman claimed to have suffered from coronavirus symptoms but, as she was in her 60s, she did not suffer severe symptoms, unlike the man taken away, who she estimated was in his 70s.

“She said that the man was weak but was still breathing when medical workers ‘bound his head’ and then his hands and feet, which were ‘still moving,’” Taiwan News reported, noting that she also lamented that the hospital where she received care had no other treatments available for coronavirus patients besides oxygen. In the West, doctors have begun experimenting with several drug mixtures, one of which — a combination of antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat lupus and malaria — has generated optimism in American hospitals.

The woman said she felt older patients at the hospital were treated “like dead dogs.”

Neither Taiwan News nor RFA could independently confirm the reports of Wuhan residents being burned alive.

The Chinese Communist Party claims that, as of Tuesday, it has documented 82,718 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,335 deaths across the country. The vast majority of these, 3,212 deaths, were recorded in Hubei province. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei.

Multiple reports citing sources in Wuhan’s seven funeral homes dispute this claim, estimating that the real death toll in the city is as much as ten to forty times higher than China’s official nationwide death toll. Reports of hundreds of bodies cremated in some funeral homes began surfacing in February, at the height of the epidemic in the city. Government officials did not allow residents to pick up the remains of their relatives until late March, however, as the strict lockdown that saw government officials welding Wuhan residents in their homes was still ongoing.

When the funeral homes opened to distributed ashes two weekends ago, witnesses estimated that some funeral homes were distributing as many as 5,000 sets of remains a day. Estimates as to the number of sets of remains distributed last week in Wuhan range from 30,000 to 46,000 people.

“There are suspicions that many people died in their homes without being diagnosed and, at first, there were no kits to do the test,” an unnamed resident said in a report last week. “Nobody in Wuhan believes the official numbers. The real one, only they know.”

Ma, the funeral home source speaking to RFA in its report on Monday, said that Wuhan was cremating so many bodies at some point that some incinerators broke down, resulting in cremators placing multiple bodies in one incinerator at a time to keep up with the sheer amount of remains. The result has been several reported incidents of people receiving urns with ashes featuring items they do not recognize that clearly did not belong to their loved ones.

“A resident of Wuhan’s Jiang’an district surnamed Liu said she had found a man’s belt clasp in the urn she was given, supposedly containing her mother’s ashes,” RFA noted. “And a resident of Hongshan district said he had found the remains of ceramic dental crown, denture or implant in the urn labeled with his father’s name, even though his father had never had such a thing fitted.”

The global pandemic is just one in a series of irritants that has rocked the relationship between Washington and Beijing since the Trump administration began to step up long-simmering confrontations on issues ranging from territory to trade to high-tech telecommunications.

COVID-19, however, has exposed an even deeper rift, one that widened yet again on Tuesday when China announced the expulsion of a number of American journalists. THe move underscored the growing mutual mistrust and hostility between the world’s two largest economies.

Since the virus has spread, President Donald Trump and his top aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have stepped up their criticism of China, noting consistently that the outbreak was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. They have referred to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese virus” on multiple occasions, disregarding World Health Organization terminology that avoids identifying the virus by geography.

On Tuesday alone, Trump discussed the Chinese source of virus outbreak during at least two events and denied there was any stigma attached to the label.

Yet, at a State Department news conference, Pompeo referred six times to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” and suggested the Chinese are attempting to distract the world from the shortcomings of its initial response by highlighting its tough measures that have helped contain the outbreak. Pompeo also suggested that an “after action” report would corroborate his claim, indicating that the tensions are unlikely to end when the pandemic is over.

Experts are not unsympathetic to that position.

“They made some blunderous mistakes in the early six or seven weeks, and then they came down hard with a gargantuan quarantine,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“And they now control the narrative that this has been hugely successful and they suppress whatever additional dissident thoughts there may be on exactly what’s going on,” he told reporters in a conference call.

In a meeting with hotel executives at the White House, Trump took pains to make clear that the virus originated in China, asking pointed questions of Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson about where the impact was first felt.

“And this all started in China? That’s where you first saw the problem and where you first got hit?” Trump asked.

“Absolutely,” Sorenson replied.

“Hopefully, you all heard that,” Trump told reporters.

Pompeo has led a worldwide campaign to try to stop countries from allowing the Chinese high-tech giant Huawei to get access to next-generation wireless networks and repeatedly warned about the dangers of Chinese investment. On Tuesday, he spoke of a “special responsibility” that China had shirked when it discovered the virus outbreak in Wuhan.

“We know that the first government to be aware of the Wuhan virus was the Chinese government,” Pompeo told reporters. “That imposes a special responsibility, to raise the flag to say: ‘We have a problem, this is different and unique and present risks.’ And it took an awful long time for the world to become aware of this risk, that was sitting there, residing inside of China.”

Having already been targeted by Trump in a trade war and by Pompeo and others for repression of Muslim and other religious and ethnic minorities in western Xinjiang Province, the Chinese have taken particular offense to the constant repetition, complaining vociferously and suggesting that the U.S. military may have actually introduced the virus to Wuhan.

“Recently, some American politicians have linked the new coronavirus with China to stigmatize China. We express strong indignation and opposition to it,” foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Tuesday. “We urge the U.S. to immediately correct its mistakes and stop unwarranted accusations against China.”

That, in turn, has prompted angry U.S. protests with the State Department hauling in China’s ambassador to the United States to complain and Pompeo calling the top Chinese diplomat to re-register the anger.

“The disinformation campaign that they are waging is designed to shift responsibility,” Pompeo said, before quickly adding that “now is not the time for recriminations.”

Yet recriminations seem to be the order of the day.

“China was putting out information which was false — that our military gave this to them,” Trump said. “That was false. And rather than having an argument I said I have to call it where it came from. It did come from China. So I think it’s a very accurate term. But no, I didn’t appreciate the fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them.”

Shortly after Trump’s comments, the Chinese foreign ministry announced the expulsion of American reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. China said the move was a reciprocal response to the Trump administration’s designation of five Chinese media outlets as foreign missions and restricting the number of Chinese who could work for them.

China described its steps as “necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the U.S.”

Pompeo rejected that.

“I regret China’s decision today to further foreclose the world’s ability to conduct free press operations that frankly, would be really good, really good for the Chinese people in these incredibly challenging global times. Where more information, more transparency are what will save lives. This is unfortunate,” he said. “I hope they will reconsider.”

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover. In mainland China, where the virus first exploded, more than 81,000 people have been diagnosed and more than 69,000 have recovered.