> How the WHO can report these numbers with a straight face is beyond me.

I think the WHO understands that they've already lost any credibility they once had and have strategically pivoted to being more of a political organization.

“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

How you are able to have such cognitive dissonance in believing that China is an authoritarian government that locks down entire buildings because someone tested positive for a mutation of a cold virus but also not believe they have had few covid cases is beyond me.

They also have a ridiculously huge and dense urban population.

And everybody wears masks. Everybody wore masks even before the pandemic due to the pollution.

You can try entering Beijing from the outside and see how difficult it is.

I found two interesting points after comparing numbers from WTO and China CDC (https://2019ncov.chinacdc.cn/2019-nCoV/):

1. The death toll is the same, but the number of confirmed cases reported by China CDC is much smaller than WTO (380k vs 710k). I guess people caught covid with no symptoms are excluded by China CDC.

2. After subtracting death toll in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there're only 4.6k deaths in China mainland since 2020.

I don't know about the data in that link, but China is tracking cases without symptoms, and publish those numbers each day

The WHO can only report what the health authorities of each country report to them.

Is Uyghur incarceration also a conspiracy theory, or does CCP lie about that but never about COVID?

Lockdown now is not exclusive with false case and death numbers.

That's not very fun. You're supposed to tell me a convincing story about why the lockdown is happening. Someone quickly replied to me about how the present lockdown is specifically intended to cause inflation in the U.S. Unfortunately they were too embarrassed or didn't want to face the next logical question (because conspiracy theories are never finished), so they quickly deleted the comment. But at least they tried instead of gesturing vaguely to the CCP and letting ideological obviousnesses do the heavy lifting.

Maybe the virus spilled into population centers too close to party leadership. Maybe it indeed got to the point where it is difficult to hide. I don't know.

My point is that it's on you (and WHO) to explain trusting data supplied by a country with a long history of supplying false data (in other words, believe a known liar).

I don't work for CCP so I don't know why they do stuff, but the fact that they routinely provide false information is very extensively documented.

Come back when you think of an excuse to trust their data without verification.

> Come back when you think of an excuse to trust their data without verification.

Your entire premise is based on a straw man. Nobody is blindly accepting China’s data as gospel, they are saying that it’s the only data we have.

You have presented nothing but innuendo.

Where's the science? How do you propose we verify anything? Your implication is that one (anyone?) must "work for CCP" to be able to evaluate truth. So then, where is the CCP worker who gave you the framework you're depending on, that can confirm this conspiracy of "false information?" But wait, how can we trust this hypothetical CCP defector? It's a paradox, we can't!

I do not know nor care why lockdown happens. My point is there is no reason we should trust the COVID case/death data they were advertising in the past years.

This is not about whether we should trust COVID case numbers by the US govt, this is about whether we should trust COVID case numbers by CCP.

Although it does not strike me as a bad analogy. The US government thought there were WMDs, but there were none in reality (wrong data, whoops). CCP thought there was no COVID in China, but there was in reality (wrong data, whoops).