I just don’t think many messages come out at all (considering bans on inbound travel and recent crackdowns on documentary uses of social media), and especially from outside of larger cities.

Any population of Chinese speakers in the west is going to know someone there on Wechat. I've talked to friends there as well, there's no major problem now. By contrast when things were bad in Wuhan people were reporting it.

On top of that there's plenty of foreign reporters there, and plenty of foreign diplomats who would also notice.

Yep. The Economist has a journalist over in China, and he was interviewed recently on the economist's podcast. He said covid has popped up a bunch of times since the pandemic started. Each time they've immediately launched strict lockdowns and border controls for the region involved. He's personally been tested 7 times or something since covid started - apparently getting tested is often a requirement to travel anywhere in China.

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.

> covid has popped up a bunch of times since the pandemic started

(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.