This article is taken from Les Indispensables de Sciences et Avenir #211 October/December 2022.
April 2022, in closed Shanghai. Covid cases are in the thousands every day. Funeral workers in overalls open a body bag loaded into a hearse. There’s a surprise: the alleged dead man starts moving! The widely circulated footage taken by eyewitnesses sparked outrage.
She knocks on her coffin at her own funeral
A few days earlier in Peru, a woman was declared dead after a car accident hit the lid of her coffin during her own funeral… Doctors declared her dead when she was apparently not “it” in a coma. She died—for real this time—a few hours later.
Most recently, in July 2022, a 70-year-old Spaniard was found unconscious in his home. The emergency doctor, concluding that he was biologically dead, did not attempt to resuscitate him. But in the morgue, the medical examiner noticed that he was still breathing…
Very specific criteria in France
In France, all deaths must be certified by a doctor, who issues a certificate based on certain criteria: lack of reflexes and reaction to light, unconsciousness, and cardiorespiratory arrest. Reassuring…but the clinical diagnosis still needs to be made correctly.