You don't need to rely on the data by the Chinese government, for several reasons:

1) Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

2) The numbers reported by China are also consistent with the spread observed _outside_ of China. You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases. (Case point - In Canada, we're importing way more cases from the US than you'd expect if there were actually only 1200 cases in the US. This is rather because the US is lagging so far behind in testing, rather than outright deception.)

The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China, still gaining momentum in Europe, and coming in a big way soon to North America.

> Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

Please provide a source for this. I have not seen any of this data used. The data I see used is from the CCP's official data.

> You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases.

This is absolutely false. Because flights have been suspended from China to most countries, and China itself has been on lockdown, the number of imported cases to other countries does not reflect the growth of the virus inside of China.

> The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China

Please provide proof that is not coming from CCP.

No offense, but there's no reason to believe you on this without providing sources. Most of what you have said smells like BS.

I think the point is that you have to wait until the city gets back to normal to judge the efficacy of the lockdown.

It's uncanny, because the various testing regimes implemented in the places where there have been outbreaks ought to be providing wildly inconsistent data, but the data from around the world is all showing a strikingly similar pattern. Once there's a community outbreak, the starting gun is off and it plays out like clockwork. The best you can hope to do is gum up that clockwork with draconian quarantine measures, because the starting gun is off all over the continental United States. Wash hands across America.