Could not find the exact reference, but here are some other bullshit from that time: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml That "transparency" and "openness" were quoted a lot but it was not the case at all. Many chinese doctors and journalists were shut down.

A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without being downvoted to hell and called a shill. Everybody agreed that all numbers were completely made up, because somebody was able to fit a quadratic curve through 3 of their data points.

I still can't say China's data was real without being called a shill, but it's getting increasingly obvious that this was the case. China's numbers line up perfectly with what visiting WHO observers saw (as stated in their latest report), their hospital occupancy, their rate of exported cases, economic activity in the country, and the day to day experience of hundreds of millions of actual human beings. Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism.

There is definitely opaqueness and one needs to know how to read the data. For example China does not report people who test positive but do not develop pneumonia. The criteria for classification is clearly listed in the national guideline but is easy to escape notice because the daily report is terse and does not reference the definitions. It may not be a big deal in terms of assessing mortality (WHO explained the percentage of asympotamaic cases that test positive is small), but it can make a significant difference when assessing risk for a particular region. If a region reports zero case but there is actually a postive test, the risk outlook is quite different even though the report is technically correct.

But it would be unfortunate to then disregard all Chinese data. That would be like throwing out the baby with bath water. If we don't study their experience we will be bound to repeat their mistakes. Fortunately this does not appear to be the case with medical professionals and scientists, judging from the volume of peer reviewed publications coming out of China.

> jacking off on nationalism

Please don't comment like this here, regardless of how frustrating you find some other comments.

Are you agreeing with me that people shouldn't do that? Or are you saying that calling out people that do that is the real problem?

I'm outnumbered 100:1 here by users that flood almost all of these threads and never say anything actually correct, following blind nationalistic instinct.

There's more than one "the real problem". Moderating one doesn't preclude moderating others.

Lashing out with phrases like "jacking off on nationalism" is flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines. You need to follow the rules regardless of how outnumbered you are, or how wrong others are or you feel they are. I know the experience and I know it's frustrating, but that's the way it is when you're representing a contrarian view. When someone possesses a truth that others don't, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard, because if you sink to a degraded level in presenting that truth, you end up discrediting it, which harms the minority cause you're trying to serve, and harms other people by driving them further from the truth.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Sigh. Alright, understood, thanks for modding.

I know it's not easy.