Ok, so I’m going all CT this week. Though, perhaps we will use the term cover up instead. This one has to do with…what is the real death toll in China, as opposed to the official one. Officially, China’s death toll is 3,316, according to the CDC’s site. This correlates pretty well with the WHO site, if you are more comfortable with them. This has been fairly flat for weeks now, as have the number of confirmed cases (around 82k)…again, fairly flat for weeks now.
Thing is…does that seem reasonable to anyone? Does it seem plausible? :dubious: It doesn’t to me, that’s for sure. So, going to link to one of my favorite sources about China, China Uncensored and this video that explores this question.
Since, again, I know no one will actually watch the video, I’ll give the highlights. The host, Chris Chappell makes a case that the numbers are much higher using extrapolated data, including the number of cremations in Hubei province of a single crematorium. According to Chris, the usual number of deaths (average number) for a crematorium in Hubei in 2018 was around 200 (he rounded up). Today, it’s over 3k. And, again according to Chris, this has been happening, non-stop, for over a month. The estimate (extrapolation) he makes for all of the crematorium in the province puts the figure in this province alone at over 48k deaths. In basically 2 months. There is a pretty big difference in those figures. And, as he points out, that’s one province…no reason they would just be covering it up there only.
I’m not going to get into why the CCP would cover this up, as to me that’s a no-brainer whether you think they are or aren’t they have reasons to do so. HOW would they cover it up? That’s probably a better question. Chris addresses this as well, but I’ll make a more logic based argument that is going to require the reader to consider the Chinese organ harvesting business as well as the concentration…sorry, re-education…camps in Tibet and Xinjiang. The leap here is you need to accept, at least provisionally, that the CCP has in fact been engaged in organ harvesting for over a decade (since the 90’s really) wrt dissidents and things like Falun Gong, and that they are also well schooled in making folks in their various camps disappear. If you can’t buy that, then it’s a head scratcher as to how they could make the potentially 10’s or 100’s of thousands of deaths not reported disappear, so you probably aren’t going to buy any of this. If you can at least provisionally accept that the CCP MIGHT be doing those things though, you probably already see that the CCP has a well oiled machine with decades of experience in doing just this. Only down side to them is probably…can’t harvest those organs for a profit, damn the luck!
Chris goes into some additional detail, though the citations he’s using are definitely not going to be anything any right thinking 'doper would use (hell, I don’t accept things coming from the Daily Mail :p), but I think this is another compelling case. Mostly because I know the CCP is covering up the extent of the infection and number of deaths, so on this one I don’t really need a lot of compelling to see it as happening.
Um…ok. That’s actually less relevant than it was in the other thread, but thanks for the video. BTW, I loved the movie and agree with you it should be required watching.
I’ve wondered the same thing about those Wuhan death figures, although 48,000 deaths sounds way too massive to truly hide. But from the very beginning of the epidemic, Chinese netizens have been passive-aggressively mocking the Chinese government’s official stats. Back in January, it was the “2.1% virus” - where the number of infections in growth was always an exact 2.10%, day after day after day after day. My Chinese friends starting sharing it on WeChat, mocking, “What a mathematically precise virus.”
The WHO has access to all the same data as the guy in that video. More, in fact. And they have no incentive to lie. I don’t trust the Chinese government, but if the WHO’s numbers agree with them, I’m inclined to trust the WHO.
The WHO gets their data from the CCP. If you are inclined to trust the WHO, and the data they are getting directly from the CCP, that’s fine. You are entitled. But just know, that is not a really compelling counter argument except to those who trust the narrative. This leaves aside my own thoughts on how reliable the WHO actually is in this thing, or the whole ‘no incentive to lie’ part, which to me is laughable, and just talks about where the WHO data comes from.
You seem to miss the point. The reality is, aside from whether the official figures from the Chinese government are accurate or not (I tend to the side of “not”, in part because they probably didn’t have a good accounting of infections at the time those were released, and because the CPC certainly wants to whitewash their responsibility in every way possible as they do in pretty much every other way), the spreading of baseless conspiracy theories while a global pandemic is at hand is pointless and irresponsible. We already have enough things feeding prejudice and panic the without amplification of calling the pathogen the “CCP Virus” or otherwise stirring shit in pretty much the same way the Jude Law character does in Contagion. Once the pandemic is under control there will be plenty of time to focus on serological analysis to determine the zoonotic pathway, and regardless of how much the CPC might want to cover the tracks of any alleged conspiracy it will be pretty evident if there are artificial manipulations in the viral genome.
Fair enough, though I disagree that we should be looking past what the CCP is doing right now because of the crisis. But I agree with the broader sentiment, which is why I stopped participating in the CDC thread as well as haven’t wanted to get into the morbid ‘how many will die’ threads.
I didn’t see what your point was, as I recall the movie but not the context, but I see what you are getting at. I still don’t think that it was relevant as you did it, but glad you expanded so someone as dense as I could get your point.
I don’t understand why the internet in general is deathly afraid of “Russian bots” but then the pro-PRC bots are able to run around freely without question. It’s getting to the point questioning anything related to China’s handling of the covid-19 situation gets a “xenophobia” label thrown at you.
There is some component of the fallacy of the average. He looks at one crematorium and assumes it is average both before and after the disease broke. He also assumes others continued to run at average rate.
Let me propose a different theory that also fits the data. Due to the disease and an abundance of caution, a decision to mandate cremation for every body is a reasonable control on possible spread. The virus does not typically transmit via bodily fluids but enhanced precautions to make sure employees of the crematorium are not infected and spreading the disease still makes reasonable sense. Those precautions may be easier and cheaper to implement if you limit the number of crematoriums you use. If one is enough only use one. Since the government is already limiting gatherings, like attendance at a memorial service, timeliness is less of an issue than during normal times. Truck drivers interacting with crematorium employees or delivering to families can be a risk of transmission. Limiting those interactions is possible. Stash refrigerated trucks at hospitals as temporary morgues to stockpile remains and limit deliveries. Build up large numbers of urns before pickup. Don’t ship urns until the situation improves enough to risk deliveries to the families.
5000 urns is about the total of just routine deaths across 38 days if only one crematorium is working in the area. Throw in higher death rates directly caused by coronavirus and other conditions being more lethal due to an overtaxed medical system. If we double the normal daily death rate from all causes in the period right before the pickups, that would be 19 days worth of deaths on those two trucks.
Sure the Intelligence Community agrees in general with him. They have the resources to gather far more information, actually disprove my assumptions, and create better estimates. That does not make the argument in the video any more sound or his estimate of deaths any more accurate. It just means the blind squirrel found his nut.
Are we supposed to be surprised that a country like China, with years of human rights abuses, a history of murdering millions of its own people and the like is now lying about how many people have died from this virus?
From what I’ve seen around the 'tubes, I’m supposed to be shocked that China is lying. I don’t get it.
Well, except it was 3k urns a day for over a week…positing it was several weeks. And looking at the fact that the average for that facility in 2018 was around 200. Even if you are right, the numbers don’t add up, and I’ve seen no evidence that none of the other crematoria are closed down in the region. Granted, in this region they have huge, mega facilities, not a bunch of small ones, but there are several there. Doing the math though, at 3k a day for a week you get more, alone, than the total the CCP is acknowledging. In fact, doing the math, if they did that amount in 1 day, then that equals the total the CCP is saying for the entire country for the entirety of the outbreak, minus like 400. Is it plausible that 400 is the total for the rest of China combined?
The thing is, just think for a moment about the implication of the numbers we are being given in the context of several other countries. I know people think the CCP medical system is some sort of miracle system, but the reality is that the system is very mixed. It has some VERY good facilities. And a shit ton of very bad ones. Hell, just think about the fact that, officially, the CCP has been talking about TCM as a thing wrt treating this thing, and WHY they are doing that. I know, a lot has been said about them setting up a hospital in 10 days, but the reality there is different than the narrative, and a lot of what we hear is propaganda bullshit. THINK about the numbers. Is it really plausible that, in a country as densely populated as China is, with a disease that has done what it’s done to western countries that had a heads up, in theory, about it, and was allowed to run rampant for at least a week, if not a month during a time when literally 10’s of millions of Chinese were traveling around (run up to Chinese new year and all), is really only some 80k infected and 3k dead? :dubious: We are talking about a country that, quite literally, lies about everything. And pressures others to repeat the lies. Think about their narrative with Hong Kong, or with the NBA, or any of numerous other examples. And think about what the WHO has said and done in this crisis…and what many western press are doing and saying. Or not saying. Is Chris and China Uncensored right? I think so. But regardless, just sit back and think about what you are being told in the context of what you know from open western governments wrt the numbers. Then consider…if the CCP is not lying, why are they still suppressing comments from their own citizens on their internet? Why have they pushed out western media companies, even those that were in their pocket? Why the quasi-official statements about how it’s REALLY the US at fault, that it originated here or even that we let it loose as a bio-weapon. I know most roll their eyes at that, but CCP officials do not make crazy off the cuff statements like that (and don’t get hammered or squashed) without tacit approval from the top. It doesn’t happen.
Who is ‘we’? Look around? How many just on this board by the official story? Look at this quote from a well trusted and respected (IMHO anyway) poster in this thread:
Chronos, a smart and skeptical poster trusts the WHO and by extension the CCP. Why? Because the WHO is a trusted and respected organization. But where does the WHO get their data? The CCP. It’s circular logic, yet he is convinced this is all bullshit. Stranger, another well respected poster, thinks (with some merit) we shouldn’t be talking about crazy crap like this now, in the midst of a crisis because it detracts from the fight. Another reason is probably because crazy idiots like Trump have implied this sort of thing, and, frankly, if I knew nothing that alone would be enough to put the quash on even thinking about this, as the dude isn’t even right as often as a stopped clock. But, the trouble with this is, it’s critically important that we know how bad it is in China. We NEED to dig into this and really find out. The reason is China is doing it’s best to get people back to work, as well as portray itself as the savior of the planet and the model we should all follow. There are several critical issues with that, but the main ones I see is if the Chinese PEOPLE are convinced everything is good, while it’s still really bad, they are going to go back to work and it will go from really bad in China to out of control. Also, we are being sold a narrative by our own press…respected outlets, not Fox News et al…that perhaps we need to look harder into the China model wrt containing the outbreak. This is based on the data that China contained it’s outbreak, and it was, relatively speaking comparing to population numbers, much less than just about every other country out there with a major outbreak. Should we go with authoritarianism in the face of this thing and be like the Chinese to protect our citizens? It’s an actual question I’ve seen, though I don’t know if those spouting it have thought of the implications of such a thing with someone like Trump at the helm of a country like the US.
I think that we need to dig into this. We need to find out if the WHO has been playing along, and how that is happening. We need to find out if China is going to explode, or at least if the numbers are a lot worse than they said so we can look at the reality of how effective China was in containing this thing. Right now, there is a lot of smoke, but our own trusted institutes aren’t looking into whether there is any fire or it’s all just smoke. And, sadly, this all circles back to the CCP…are they actually telling the truth, this time? Of all the times they haven’t been (which is just about all the times), is THIS time different? Their own people don’t seem in lockstep on the answer to that.
Yeah, that’s just it. Why would anybody with half a brain believe anything that the Chinese government says? That’s what I don’t get. And if the WHO gets its info directly from China, why believe that?
And it seemed like everyone knew that, until THIS time. NOW, all of a sudden, China is telling the truth? Come on. :rolleyes: