On top of that there's plenty of foreign reporters there, and plenty of foreign diplomats who would also notice.
Those policies sound even more strict than what we've been doing in Australia, and we had 2 weeks with 0 locally transmitted cases. With procedures like that it makes sense they have covid under control.
(The times when news got out.)
The ability of Chinese authorities to suppress the information domestically (again, recent crackdowns on using social media for self-journalism), as well as to influence Western sources, shouldn’t be underestimated. I wouldn’t mind listening to that podcast though.
I know about COVID test results required for travel, but I don’t take it as much of an indicator if you consider people outside major cities who do not travel much (especially now that there’s an extra barrier to it) and may just suffer from virus outbreaks in localized clusters where they live.
Either way, what we don’t have is reliable numbers of how many people were tested, and how many of them were positive, across China.
CCP is known to misinform with less at stake than this, and to not care all that much about large areas of rural territory (recall the one child policy, which was more or less unenforced outside of larger cities and resulted in the depressing phenomenon of millions of “invisible” children who are outside of the system and do not have access to education or healthcare). With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the virus has been raging over the countryside, unreported.
That is not to say I know one way or the other, but merely to point out that relying on official information may not be correct—one ought to look at secondary signs, such as new hospitals being built or some inconsistencies in numbers. Claiming that centralized measures helped get the virus under control based on official numbers from a totalitarian regime may be disingenuous.