For all we know, China just stopped counting and is accepting whatever new cases or deaths come up.
We know they fake other numbers. There's not reason not to think they aren't faking them here.
If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire family and friends group.
A few months into this, basically every single American media outlet was tripping over themselves to defend American values when it was abundantly clear that they were impeding our ability to successfully respond to this crisis. There was a huge appetite for bashing China / authoritarianism and pointing out the universal superiority of our system. The fact that we have largely heard nothing about the Chinese response (no criticism, no praise, no critique, not even general acknowledgement that it was much different than ours) from the government or the media suggests that it was a success whereas our efforts were a colossal failure and we don't want to talk about it or admit it: this situation doesn't align with the story we tell ourselves ((freedom and democracy) > authoritarianism, always).
> If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire family and friends group
We are basically a year into this with 500K dead and counting. How many citizens need to die before people stop feeling the need to create throwaway accounts to announce that this whole thing is overblown.
What data am I gonna show you? the only available data says "they defeated it" and it comes from the state government.
>We are basically a year into this with 500K dead and counting. How many citizens need to die before people stop feeling the need to create throwaway accounts to announce that this whole thing is overblown.
Like I said, I literally only know one soul who got this. They recovered in two days. My Aunt & Uncle are emergency room nurses and say that it's overblown _now_ (last April? was definitely bad).
I also don't know anybody who dies from the seasonal flu that claims a lot of people too.
I literally don't know anybody. I'm not being facetious, though I'm incredibly frustrated watching my city melt away, but I just haven't seen it. I would've expected bodies on the sidewalk given how stringent everything has been.
https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/asia/china-covid-ec...
I am also getting anecdata from people living in Shanghai and Beijing. Life has largely returned to normal outside of people wearing masks.
OP was likely asking because he wanted to see non-Chinese sources on this.
On one hand, yes, obviously China's numbers cannot be trusted, at all.
On the other hand, most of their neighbors, whose numbers are substantially more trustworthy, also managed to get it under some semblance of control.
Given the latter point, I'm guessing they mostly got it under control.
The Chinese were placing everyone under house arrest, mandating mask use, monitoring everyone's movements at checkpoints, temperature checking anyone who left their house when possible, banning people from going outside more than X times per week, forcibly quarantining, arresting non-compliant people, shuttering every non-essential business under the strictest interpretation of "essential", blocking internal travel, physically isolating cities, requiring quarantine when returning from traveling abroad, etc. The US government didn't really do any of that. To anyone aware of the contrast in national responses, it was very obvious that we would not be able to replicate China's success and that COVID would be around until we got a vaccine.