> There's absolutely zero evidence to support that China did well.
There's supply chain evidence that things are going back to normal on China side. They wouldn't be able to hide all these deaths that would happen if they just told the sick people to go back to work.
Meanwhile, there's very little evidence that would suggest their numbers are lies. Sure, they weren't exactly forthcoming at the beginning - but then again, until few days ago, US government was lying even more than they did, and yet we don't assume this means today's numbers are bullshit (as opposed to being limited by still-lacking testing capability).
What are their real case and death numbers? We'll never know, because they've lied about everything from day one. They have been the exact opposite of transparent about anything.
China only had ~82,000 cases, but Italy, Germany and Spain are all going to surpass that? Yeah right. Inflate China's numbers by 10x and you might be close. In late January / early February they magically changed which cases they were counting toward their official figures, intentionally excluding mild cases that tested positive. That's what produced the instant tapering you see in their case numbers from that date in time forward. It's also why their case growth graph looks so unique - bizarre - compared to everyone else that has had a bad outbreak.