Well, China, in particular, is a known quantity here. They reported a total of 144 influenza deaths in 2018 of 700k infected. Personally, I consider that a lie. Others would say that they simply use different statistical methods. The truth is, they use this sort of number fudging internally as propaganda. See, the west suffers hundreds of thousands of influenza deaths per year, right? And China only had 144. Clearly TCM is superior to Western medicine, etc...

China has a history of embellishing and fabricating all sorts of published economic numbers. The number of funeral urns being collected is raising questions about the true toll (https://time.com/5811222/wuhan-coronavirus-death-toll/). Democratic countries can skew their ICU or death statistics, but only so far.

There is one possible explanation: China annual death rate is around 7.3 per 1000. In a city with 11 millions people (wuhan), there would be 6600 death per month without COVID 19.

Iirc, trump has censorship powers under the emergency act. If he really wants business to reopen after Easter, I hope journalists are going to be ready for some fact checking

By "censorship", do you mean no numbers or fake numbers?

> I would appreciate it if we avoided this kind of hearsay on HN during these difficult times.

This graph makes it quite clear that Japan is hiding their numbers (also Iran and South Korea):

https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?country=Australia&country=C...

The Graph also shows that China either has a cure, or is fuzzing their numbers as well.

At minimum, China does not include asymptomatic cases in official counts.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/china-s-h...

Then it would be good to explain clearly why Japan is such a large outlier while Korea was not. And please no "they wear masks" and "they wash hands" bullshit, because there are no more masks in Japan for months now and hygiene is approximative at best - and apart form closed schools it's pretty much business as usual in Japan so there is virtually no reason why the virus would not run its course here as well.

>Then it would be good to explain clearly why Japan is such a large outlier

I decline. It might be what coopsmgoops suggests, or it may be something else. I don't posess the facts and therefore I won't speculate on matters of public health.

This might just be a transient anomaly, perhaps exacerbated by insufficient testing.

But if it's a real difference, the possibility of genetic resistance ought to be explored. It's not that it would likely make any practical difference. But it would at least be interesting, and one never knows.

Japanese ppl don’t like touching each other they don’t really shake hands socially but they bow when saying hello and good bye. That is not the main reason but things like this in a culture adds up. Japanese is also exceptionally clean

> Japanese ppl don’t like touching each other they don’t really shake hands socially but they bow when saying hello and good bye

Yet they stick to each other like sardines in a can when they take public transport every single day in Tokyo and Osaka - and we are talking about dozens of millions of people who transit every single day. That should be the primary mode of exposure especially since masks have completely run out in Japan for months.

So, unlikely to be a good explanation, sorry.

I would appreciate if you can breakdown how cleanliness in Japan (say vs. the US) helps stop (propagate for the US) the spread of the Corona Virus. I have seen the Japan is exceptionally clean argument which is independent of the Japanese don't like to touch each other and are less touchy-feely as a culture (hugs, handshakes, etc. ) than Western countries.

Korea is also a large outlier. It would be even more of an outlier if not for megachurches which don't exist in Japan.