Given the number of times the Chinese government has been shown to lie and actively try to hide dissenting people/information when it tells a story they don't want told... I think it's fair to start from a point of distrust. Sure, it doesn't mean they're lying about the numbers here, but they started out this whole thing by lying about it, by throwing someone (a doctor?) that did speak out in jail.

They did not throw any doctor in jail.

I don't trust the Chinese government but I think if they were lying then their opponents would be able to build a more persuasive case by now.

My apologies, I was mis-remembering. Dr. Li Wenliang was arrested, questioned, and officially reprimanded for warning about the Corona virus outbreak. Looking now, I don't see that he was actually thrown in jail.

That being said, it does still speak to the point of the Chinese government and their attempts to control the narrative. At least for me, that makes me start from a point of distrust over anything they say.

There is no claim about the US government in the parent comment, so this is entirely beside the point.

I don't see how obvious discrepancies between the official Wuhan death toll and on-the-ground accounts constitute "wild" derivations.

Moreover, Radio Free Asia is quoting named residents, so this cannot plausibly be described "anonymously sourced US propaganda" or "fake news". [1]

In general, I think one should be skeptical of any statistics produced by a totalitarian dictatorship for Western consumption.

[1] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wuhan-deaths-03272020...

by fake news I was referring to the "disappeared journalists", no credible source has made such allegations

I would suggest that you look at the region-level data for China, and just see if it looks anything like the European data.

For my money, I don't trust the US intelligence community but I still think that the Chinese numbers are somewhat implausible.

The charts show an identical dropoff in almost every region at the same time. We can see, from the European experience, that there's a lag between lockdown and case saturation. This does not appear in the Chinese data, which makes me somewhat sceptical.

Note that I'm not an epidemiologist, so it's possible that there's something else driving those numbers that I'm missing.

How can we trust a country that that is willing to block Tiananmen Square or even Winnie the Pooh from social media?

I don’t think the great firewall will let the bad news come out