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Alarming footage shows mask-wearing crowds inside a Chinese hospital amid fears over a mystery pneumonia sweeping the country.

Beijing insists a new virus is not to blame for scenes of chaos, which have prompted officials to encourage residents to don coverings, socially distance and stay home if unwell.

Instead, health chiefs have pinned the rise on flu and other routine bugs, with China now battling its first full winter without a Covid-induced lockdown.

Local media has reported health facilities as being 'overwhelmed with sick children'.

However, China's health ministry claims it can cope with the spike in sickness, which sparked global panic last week when news of the situation emerged.

Concerns led the World Health Organization (WHO), in a rare public intervention, to formally request further information from Beijing on the infections.

Commentators highlighted the wave of sickness was eerily similar to the reports that emerged just prior to Covid, which China was accused of covering up.

Crowd is seen in at Beijing Hospital after respiratory illness surge


In a fresh statement on Sunday, the country's health ministry claimed the surge in cases was caused by the flu and other known pathogens.

It ruled out a novel virus, like the one which sparked Covid after triggering its own mystery pneumonia wave in December 2019.

A National Health Commission spokesperson said the recent clusters of respiratory infections are caused by an overlap of common viruses like flu and RSV, as well as bacteria such as mycoplasma pneumoniae.

They added the ministry has called upon local authorities to open more fever clinics and to promote vaccine uptake among children and the elderly.

'Efforts should be made to increase the opening of relevant clinics and treatment areas, extend service hours and increase the supply of medicines,' said ministry spokesman Mi Feng.

He also advised people to wear masks and called on local authorities to focus on preventing the spread of illnesses in crowded places such as schools and nursing homes.

Chinese health authorities have blamed the surge in winter bugs hitting the nation harder due to lowered immunity in the population as the nation faces its first full winter without Covid pandemic restrictions.

Beijing only began loosening its strict nationwide 'zero-Covid' policies in December last year after mass protests that saw people calling on Xi Jinping to step down.

Independent experts have backed up China's claim the surge is linked to lowered immunity, as other nations, including the US and UK, experienced similar post-lockdown waves of illness.

However, others, including the UK Health Security Agency, have said we must keep an 'open mind' about the cause of the mystery pneumonia, with many citing Beijing's lack of transparency during the early stages of the Covid pandemic.

Both Covid and another pandemic virus called SARS were first reported as unusual types of pneumonia.

The WHO said Chinese health officials on Thursday provided the data it requested during a teleconference.

Those showed an increase in hospital admissions of children due to diseases including bacterial infection, RSV, influenza and common cold viruses since October.

Chinese officials maintained the spike in patients had not overloaded the country's hospitals, according to the WHO.

This is despite images of overwhelmed Chinese hospital waiting rooms crammed with parents and children spreading on the nation's social media channels.

Local media reported last week that hospitals in Beijing and 500 miles northeast in Liaoning were 'overwhelmed with sick children' with unusual symptoms that include inflammation in the lungs and a high fever but no cough.

Taiwanese outlet FTV News reported that hospitals were being 'overwhelmed' with sick children.

It added that 'parents questioned whether the authorities were covering up the epidemic'.

The newly published footage has been verified as being from one of the hospitals grappling with the outbreak, but it not known exactly when it was filmed.

The WHO's public intervention is rare, with the UN health agency typically making such requests behind closed doors.

WHO said it requested further data from China via an international legal mechanism.

According to internal accounts in China, the outbreaks have swamped some hospitals in northern China, including in Beijing, and health authorities have asked the public to take children with less severe symptoms to clinics and other facilities.

WHO said that there was too little information at the moment to properly assess the risk of these reported cases of respiratory illness in children.

However, a WHO official has said the wave of cases is not as high as the nation experienced before Covid swept the country, and the world.

Maria Van Kerkhove, acting director of the WHO's department of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, also echoed comments from China that the increase appeared to be driven by children contracting pathogens that they hadn't encountered due to two years of Covid restrictions.

'The waves that they´re seeing now, the peak is not as high as what they saw in 2018-2019' she said.

'This is not an indication of a novel pathogen. This is expected. This is what most countries dealt with a year or two ago.'

Both China and the WHO have been accused of a lack of transparency in their initial reports on the Covid pandemic.

The world was first alerted to Covid in similar circumstances to the current outbreak, with reports of a mystery pneumonia in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019.