The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate. Case fatality rates go from less than 1% to more than 10%. In France, on the official website where they give the numbers, it is clearly written "we don't test everyone, the actual number of cases is higher", and deaths are "of COVID-19 patients dying in hospitals". All numbers are made up, because there is no way to know the actual numbers.
And don't tell me that anything after January was China's fault. It is not like governments around the world didn't know what happened there. Maybe the general public wasn't well informed but it is trivial for a government to be aware of an event of such scale. No, China may be to blame for the initial cases, but for the pandemic phase, it is completely our fault.
> And don't tell me that anything after January was China's fault. It is not like governments around the world didn't know what happened there.
Both are possible, and both are very likely. China suppressed information to save face, and many other countries were incompetent in responding to the information they did have access to.
This is exactly the point of parent comment: people are simply repeating the same narrative based on "the history" as if we are still in cold war and it is impossible to know what really happened in China, while this is no longer true.
Surely the situation is not ideal, in that you still need hours to read between lines and investigate, China must improve on this, but the virus just showed us one thing: being dismissive about anything coming out of China may lead to a global disaster. We should either try to understand, or cut ties with China.
Try to understand, precisely, what?
It's a very simple cause-and-effect.
a) Fox News
b) China
But as you ignored the last question (Answer: China is a big country, not Fox News), here's a new one for you. Which Chinese guy named Li Wenliang tried to warn people the shit was hitting the fan and then got seriously slapped down for it because reality wasn't what president Xi wanted to hear? And then died of exactly what he was trying to warn about?
As my Chinses is poor may I ask a favour of you, that you translate this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/%E6%9D%8... for us, please.
Thank you.
I understand what you are talking about, but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January. And there was that report from secret service that was known by goverment and became public later. The situation being bad in China was not opaque or unknown. They dis not actually managed to make it much of secret.
And right now, "Chinese are lying" is used as propaganda to make Americans think that situation is quite good and defensive measures are unnecessary. It just can't possibly be that America has taken lead in infected. America ia the greatest always and in everything. It just can't be, it would be just fine to open economy and it is all hoax.
Anyway
> American doctor was fired for talking about lack of materials for doctors and nurses
Link please. Then we'll see if it's so, and if so, if there's any comparison.
> but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January
Indeed there was. I used that info to prepare BTW. And it only got out because the CCP could not suppress it totally. So "the CCP failed to suppress..." is not the same as "the CCP published...". Indeed, you said it better than I did: "They di[d] not actually managed to make it much of secret"
Wenliang had more balls and brains than the entire CCP put together. I salute the gent.
> And right now, "Chinese are lying"
Not The Chinese. Not Wenliang and those like him. The CCP and their mouthpieces.
> It just can't possibly be that America has taken lead in infected
The US fucked up monumentally and will pay the price. That much the US recognises, and all of it will do in just a very few weeks.
BTW could you translate that letter for us?
covid
> what is happening
covid
> what does all these mean
No idea, what does all these mean?
> instead of being dismissive
I didn't dismiss, I asked. Answer the question.
> claiming they are lies and propaganda
No, you just said that. I asked a question. Answer the question please, to wit, What am I being asked to understand.
China suppressed covid information because that's it's nature; deny until it can't just deny any more. Now exactly the same, downvotes against something because you just can't answer it- what's Chinese for "the leopard can't change it's spots"?
The fact is, China has always been on don't trust and verify relationship. You don't listen to what they say, but watch what they do. And China is one of the most watched country by foreign analysis and intelligence officials everywhere. If shutting down a city and then the country is less of an urgent indicator than their numbers collated together during an uncharted event, then you're focusing on the wrong thing. This is well understood by people in China policy who cultivate relationships with Chinese counterparts as part of intelligence gathering... intelligence that countries failed to act on. For example the Chinese CDC was basically modeled after and trained by the US CDC. There are many unofficial channels between Chinese and HK/Taiwan/US medical communities which is one reason why HK and Taiwan was so ahead of the curve. There's also thousands of expats in China and millions of Chinese diaspora with connections to the mainland. There's no shortage of information on a massively public crisis like this, there are only people who don't know how to look, or looked and decided to ignore what they found. And more disconcertingly, on a diplomatic level between western countries - the possibility that information isn't being shared behind the usual channels because lack of US leadership in the last few years has undermined world order.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/business/media/china-expe...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/washington-sla...
Of course we play it off as being "fair" and setting quotas.
There's a huge difference between accuracy and unadulterated deception. If the numbers are off by 10%, you can claim it's inaccurate, but if the numbers are off by a lot more, it starts moving into deception territory. Right now, assuming the stories about urns being delivered to funeral homes are accurate, it sounds like numbers might be off my 2x or more. That's deception.
On the other hand, the number of urns being delivered to funeral homes can be easily explained. For example, the urns story talks about a fact, the amount of empty urns being delivered to funeral homes exceeds death count. But selling urns is marketized and people could pick their preferred combination of style, size and price, so this can be well explained. The story then goes ahead and matches this fact-based but pointless number with "random users on social media claims 3500 urns will be delivery daily during next two weeks". I mean, that's smelly.
Sure they were.
> Wuhan residents are increasingly skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s reported coronavirus death count of approximately 2,500 deaths in the city to date, with most people believing the actual numbers is at least 40,000
https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-covid-19-death-toll-may-tens-...
> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival. By that estimate, 42,000 urns would be given out in the 12-day period.
Just a few sources, you can find many others if you look though.
> Trucks dropped off roughly 2,500 urns on Wednesday and again on Thursday local time to one of the eight local funeral homes, a driver told Chinese media outlet Caixin. The news site also published another photo showing 3,500 urns stacked inside the facility. The number of urns that arrived in that one funeral home was far greater than the city's official overall death COVID-19 toll.
Note that the numbers given are for EMPTY urns.
> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival.
Note that this is based on "some random Wuhan residents playing numbers on social network".
Yeah, when the government hides information and imprisons journalists, that's all we're left with, isn't it?
They're not the same source, by the way. They're multiple different community sources reporting the same information.
The lack of response from the US is in no way due to China's reporting, it's due to the US propaganda and incompetence.
Both governments do bad things. Both do good things. The world is not black and white.
You don't need to pit the two against each other. The world is a big place, with a varied history. We're all people.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wu...
All governments lie. China isn't special, no matter how desperately you want them to be. And no offense, but you seem quite biased yourself.
> So the US spreads propaganda, but not China?
They both do. You just seem to accept US propaganda as gospel.
> Anyone remember Tiananmen Square, the country of Taiwan, the country of Tibet, or the Uyghur Muslims?
What about it? Why not list the atrocities of both sides?
Using your logic, nobody's data is valid. Now what?
What about korea's data? They have even less deaths than predicted. Are they lying? Is Japan lying? If you have any proof, then provide it rather than posting propaganda - nationalreview, newsweek, etc. Or may I suggest taking a break from reading/watching news/propaganda for a bit. It can be toxic.
> an educated individual
An educated individual =/= a qualified one. There are qualified experts in government with experience managing the US-China relationship. They would not fixate on Chinese statistics in an case like this. What happened in China was not opaque like secret CPC politburo meetings. It was an incredibly, transparently, urgent crisis - the country was locked down, that alone should sound louder than any statistics coming out of China in dealing with a virus we still don't have good understanding of. China's neighbors - all the countries with experiencing managing responses to movements in China, particularly SARS, acted appropriately. The US - who has/had cultivated decades of relationships with China has many back channels to privileged information most countries don't have.
Also instead of fixating on numbers, fixate on indicators on the Chinese response because that's much more useful given where countries are. China is reopenning schools, factory are spinning backup according to expats, the same expats who can comment on the conditions of the quarantine are also attesting that no locals on their team contracted the virus. Look at imported statistics from countries repatriating citizens. Most Chinese imported cases are from returning students from NA and EU. Singaporean, Taiwanese and Canadian data shows similarly, there's virtually no positive tests coming out of China at the moment. Facts on the ground and external numbers comport that ridiculously aggressive Chinese quarantine works. The question should then be, what amount of half measures is sufficient.
Yes, because they all knew the official narrative from China could not be trusted. They ignored the words and looked at the actions.
I suspect our intelligence folk knew as well.
The emotional response we are seeing all over the country is because the average person feels like an idiot for listening to China and to the experts at the WHO.
Human-human transmission is one of the fundamental elements used to determine the urgency of an outbreak.
Dec 30: The Wuhan Municipal Health Committee reported to the WHO that 27 people had been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown cause.
Dec 31: China contacts the WHO and informs them of "cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan".
Jan 4: The WHO waited for China to release information about the "mysterious new pneumonia virus".[51] The United Nations agency activated its incident-management system at the country, regional and global level and was standing ready to launch a broader response if it was needed.
Jan 9: The WHO confirmed that the novel coronavirus had been isolated from one person who had been hospitalised. The WHO also reported that Chinese authorities had acted swiftly, identifying the novel coronavirus within weeks of the onset of the outbreak, with the total number of positively tested people being 41. The first death from the virus occurred in a 61-year-old man who was a regular customer at the market.
Jan 14: Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO's emerging diseases unit said that there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus, mainly small clusters in families, adding that "it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission"
Jan 20: After two medical staff were infected in Guangdong, China announced that the virus was human-to-human transmissible … the WHO has said [it] is deeply concerning and could signal evidence of a much larger outbreak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
China probably could have informed people earlier, but it seems easier to not tell the WHO than to pressure the WHO to keep a secret. Also, there's a difference between possible human-to-human and confirmed human-to-human transmission.
Taiwan says WHO failed to act on coronavirus transmission warning: relationship with Beijing blamed for not sharing alert over human-to-human infection
without paywall: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-03-24/taiwan...
"We asked them whether there's a possibility of human-to-human transmission. We indeed asked them and reminded them of the matter," Chou said. He said the WHO confirmed it had received the letter but did not respond to it.
Kudos to Taiwan for reminding WHO an unknown virus, just like any other virus, may possibly be H2H-transmissible!
You want "jibes" here. Jive means to talk nonsense:
Of course, it's probably more literally true that they could care less, after all, they care enough to post about it on the internet. They probably don't do that for... um... articles about the 1984 Honda Accord after all?
Oh English.
Your explanation is a retcon.
Of course, if enough people start saying "I could care less" I guess they get to decide what it means. Living languages are literally awesome.
That rephrasing hypothesis is the best I've seen yet, but still not especially persuasive.
"I could care less" can mean "I could (stand to) care less".
As in, "The amount I could care about this is zero because it's so irrelevant, but in responding to this discussion or otherwise engaging the topic, I have exhibited a bit of care, albeit undue."
For fun, I sometimes like to propose this to anyone who brings it up, but I could care less whether people say "could" or "couldn't". :)
Edit: Hah! neltnerb gets me :)
Generally however, I think there's some assumption or perhaps prior demonstration that implies a lack of care to start.
It's tough to describe. "I could care less what you do with your money" may come with a long understood history that not much care was given to this topic the past (i.e. we haven't discussed it before), and if we are now arguing about it because because some prior discussion escalated, I am indicating that I preferred the status quo with that statement (albeit in a way that probably doesn't defuse tensions in this particular example :).
If, on the other hand, you treat it as a nonsensical synonym for "I don't care", then the phrase would well have been "gooble gooble goo" and it would make no difference, since everyone knows what you mean when you say it.
I find arguing its correctness moot because there's no way to spin the sentence to be correct. At most, you can say "well, you got the point", and that's the end of it, at least when you're dealing with a descriptivist (which you aren't, in this case).
But apparently the use of the word "jive" to mean "talking nonsense" is the older, original usage, and the type of music/dance is named after the term, rather than the other way around. TIL.
The earlier musical dance/reference is the really just the Johnny Otis song which is actually just a Bo Diddley rip-off:
When you do widespread testing as China did in Zhejiang you can find a lot of mild cases. Indeed, Iceland, which did the same, has 1020 cases and 2 deaths.
Two significant notes, however:
* China reports that its outbreak has largely resolved. The vast majority of the 1,000 cases in Iceland are still active, so we don't know how many deaths Iceland will eventually have. South Korea's current fatality rate still seems to be around 1%, with many cases yet to resolve.
* China seems to include only symptomatic cases in its total. That should bias its fatality rate upwards, since the denominator does not include any asymptomatic people who resolved without developing a full case of COVID-19. (Note that this will also be true for jurisdictions that require symptoms for testing. I believe that SK tested many asymptomatic people, but the US for example is not.)
Note that the 1%CFR estimates are based on full access to medical resources. When medical systems are overwhelmed as in Italy, we expect that number to increase from that baseline. Jurisdictions that report a markedly lower fatality rate are likely to have had systematic problems in identifying or reporting on case totals.
2820 positive cases.
Positive rate: 0.8%
Iceland: 3,787 tests by March 18,
330 positive cases.
Positive rate: 8.7%
Clearly Guangdong did more testing with respect to its epidemic than Iceland.
Let's look at New York State:
172,360 tests by March 29,
59513 positive cases
Positive rate: 34.5%
Hubei population is 60M. So they'd have to do 2.7 Million tests to have the same degree of testing at Iceland.
Even with an excessive lockdown, it seems that just on this issue alone, China's numbers look really quite wrong.
That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and almost no deaths look very suspicious.
Combined with the fact that all public Chinese information is part of an 'orchestration of public opinion' (i.e. propaganda effort) and is not based in any reality, so of course, there's a credibility problem to begin with.
So you are saying that countries and regions that are under-testing relative to Iceland all have numbers that are wrong?
"That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and almost no deaths look very suspicious."
That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country outside of Hubei. The number of cases never exceeded 3,000 in any other province.
No, I'm saying that Iceland's numbers are strong, that they compare remotely well with most other nations (ie more testing, lower rate of infection), all of which, when taking together, make China's numbers look fabricated.
"That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country outside of Hubei."
3000 is an enormous number of cases, tantamount to a 'major outbreak'.
Wuhan's medical system was in complete crisis between lockdown and when the first field hospital opened 1.5w after: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047613/chin.... There's reports of entire families dying at home (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/18/coronavirus-ki...) -- I am quite doubtful Lombardy has been hit harder than Wuhan.
I will admit I'm wrong if China runs serological tests on Wuhan to determine the percent that were infected. I'll be extremely surprised if they do because the data will prove the point above (my guess? it would show 1M+ were infected, meaning only 2500 deaths was impossible).
Death being concentrated in one region is not an exclusive phenomenon in China. If you look at Korea's stats you'll realize there many provinces with zero deaths[1]:
Incheon: 58 cases, 0 death Seoul: 426 cases, 0 death Gyeongnam 95 cases, 0 death Ulsan: 45 cases, 0 death Chungbok: 44 cases, 0 death Sejong 46 cases, 0 death Deajeon: 45 cases, 0 death Chungnam: 127 cases, 0 death Jeonbuk: 13 cases, 0 death Gwangju: 20 cases, 0 death Jeonam: 9 cases, 0 death Jeju: 9 cases, 0 death Airports: 202 cases, 0 death
Deaths are only concentrated in 5 regions:
Daegu: 6624 cases, 111 deaths Gyeongbuk: 1298 cases, 38 deaths Gyeonggi: 463 cases, 5 deaths, Busan: 118 cases, 3 deaths Gangwon: 36 cases, 1 death
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...
NYT had a fascinating story on an effort in the US to scale up production of ventilators, that produced nothing in 14 years
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
Indeed, the total positive test count tells you more about changes in your testing capacity and testing criteria than it tells you about the infected population. I suppose it’s helpful in establishing the lower bound, but with no error bars on the possible upper bound.
Testing a statistically valid random sample of the population would be neither difficult or expensive. Running these tests every few days across every major metropolitan areas would be extremely useful data to report the current active infection rates.
This is useful even without an antibody test, but of course much more useful with an antibody test, because then you know not just active infection percentages but total infected percentages.
I can’t begin to speculate why this data is either not being collected or not being made available.
Death rate is somewhat useful but very lagging and also limited by not knowing the true IFR.
The only other proxy we have for guessing the total infection rate in a population is the percentage of positive tests. In NY there are districts which have 50% of tests coming back positive, which is so high as to be almost unbelievable. If that data is correct and at all indicative of the general population, it is, counter-intuitively, extremely good news.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
Well, this jibes with reality.
I could care less about actual case counts - few countries are close to having the capacity to test everyone so who cares.
What is a huge problem with China is the death statistics. Looking at Lombardy with 6k+ deaths with the outbreak not yet peaked, am I really supposed to believe that only 2.5k died in Wuhan (similar population)? The CFR outside Hubei is ridiculously low - only 1 death out of 1200 cases in Zhejiang (!)?
During China's outbreak, there were additionally lots of accusations of case data being completely made up (insufficient variance in daily numbers) and looking at basically every other country's quite noisy reports today, that was almost certainly true.
The implications are pretty vast: China's reporting actually made the disease seem less urgent than it really was. Perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved had they been more transparent.