Can they be believed?

Give this a read. Supposedly verified by on the ground outside sources

https://twitter.com/AbraarKaran/status/1236680328875474944

Maybe not in the fine details but in the broad outlines yes. With a doubling time in cases of four or five days without containment measures it would be obvious to me here in Shanghai that people were getting sick and hospitals were overloaded with new cases.

WHO's recent fact-finding visit to China believed them, FWIW.

WHO's legitimacy is declining after their approach on china and the general covid19 situation. people seem to think the WHO tried to downplay the severity

I see nothing in WHO’s actions that suggest they are downplaying things. If anything, WHO has repeatedly issues warnings for western countries to do more.

In my opinion, the distrust in WHO just reflects poorly on the people who are distrustful. They are so hell-bent on confirming their world view that China must be the bad guy, that they would rather believe that the WHO is corrupted than accepting the facts.

You can lead the horse to the water, but you can't make the horse drink the water.

The CCP claims new cases are almost eliminated outside of Wuhan city limits; that'd be a hard thing to fake if it were really churning along at peak strength.

This is actually the hardest to believe. The virus has run it course in Wuhan and it is likely dieing down as a significant number of people having developed immunity to it.

But outside of Wuhan, there is likely a number of infected persons in the population still transmitting it and waiting to resurface into more serious cases after people get back to work.

I have family in China outside Hubei province. If COVID-19 really did spread widely to the rest of China then I would have known it, and hospitals would have absolutely been overwhelmed.

There are even multiple foreigners in China who can confirm the situation. Checkout the Youtube videos by Daniel Dumbrill in February.

Might there still be hidden carriers in the population? Absolutely. China must remain vigilant. This stuff is hard.

My wife is considering flying back to China if things get worse here in the Netherlands. I agree with her: I also think that by now China is probably safer than anywhere else in the world. Multiple provinces have downgraded their emergency level, some are even virus free. Within Wuhan, multiple temporary hospitals have closed because they are no longer needed. People are slowly getting back to work. Containment efforts are shifting from ‘preventing the virus from getting out’ to ‘prevent it from getting in from foreign countries’.

That's expected based on data from South Korea - the hospitalisation rate is lower than in China with more widespread testing. The virus is both more transmissible and less virulent than the Chinese data suggests. The outcome is the same - hospital bed and ICUs swamped.

As such, we'll know when life resumes and people go back to work en masse.

Yes, I think the CCP could only stretch the truth by about one order of magnitude without the lie being obvious. Has China reported accurately every prison outbreak? Probably not. Is COVID-19 spreading widely in China now? No.