China Covid: Celebrity deaths spark fears over death toll- PublishedThe growing number of Chinese public figures whose deaths are being made public is prompting people to question the official Covid death toll.According to the specialist news website Operawire, Chu Lanlan was a soprano who specialised in Peking Opera - a theatrical art in which performers use speech, song, dance and combat movements to tell stories - and was also involved in charitable causes.He was the main author of a famous commentary published in 1978 that marked the start of the China's "Boluan Fanzheng" period - a time of eliminating chaos and returning to normal after the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution under the country's first Communist leader Mao Zedong.But there was also criticism of demonstrators who took to the streets in November in rare political protests calling for the end of leader Xi Jinping's zero-Covid policy.In an interview with state TV, the director of Beijing's Institute of Respiratory Diseases admitted the number of deaths of elderly people so far this winter was "definitely more" than in past years, while also stressing that critical cases remained a minority of the overall number of Covid cases."