All of the things in that list are someone’s speculation or analysis. Where’s the evidence?
As I said previously, all we’d need is, on one of the days where a province reported zero deaths for the record of one death to leak. Or even: in a place with no community spread reported, the record of a single person sick with covid that had not recently been abroad.
Given that hundreds of millions are back to work there should be plenty of community spread and it would be easy to find such a case.
And before anyone says it, yes, I saw the update for the Wuhan death figure.
Earlier in this thread and elsewhere, I suggested it was likely that the numbers for Hubei would be revised up in the future just because of how chaotic it was there; the medical system collapsed and many sick people had no chance to see a doctor.
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I also wanted to say that I also expect that other hotspots such as in Italy or the US may also need to do a similar revision after the outbreak has passed.
And this is what takes this to conspiracy theory levels. Specific evidence exists that would verify the conspiracy or not. Yet the evidence points away from the theory.
IN a normal theory, that means it’s less likely to be true. In a conspiracy theory, that means it is more likely to be true, because it’s part of the conspiracy.
I can’t say 100% that the numbers in China are legitimate. But I can say that we lack evidence that they aren’t. That is all we have here.
This is a board about fighting ignorance. Understanding confidence levels and how we know things should be a prerequisite.
Evidence doesn’t mean “a video tape of the murderer, with a knife, stabbing the subject”. It is silly for people to suggest that we need a higher standard of proof for news than we need for sending people to jail for years on end.
Benford’s law sends people to jail, and it should (when paired with enough other verifiable evidence from reputable sources that rule out other reasonable options).
Absolutely, and as I said in the parallel thread: I’m not aiming to defend China here. I’m quite happy to go on long rants about the Chinese government.
I’m being sufficiently skeptical of unsupported conspiracy theories, which are a scourge at the best of times, and especially problematic at times of crisis.
I never claimed any particular standard for evidence; I just gave an example of one thing that should be easy to leak and would certainly be sufficient. There are plenty of other things that would be sufficient too.
So, right now, what evidence is there, period?
If you choose not to read those that’s up to you, but you don’t get to claim I am avoiding answering.
I’ve replied, twice, and I said it’s fine if you wanted to share those answers here.
It’s just my preference not to bring it here, because this back and forth is so dumb.
I think we have an answer about whether you are capable of civility.
Way back near the start of this thread when I included you in a list of people, by mistake, and you pointed it out, I immediately took it back and apologized to you. When you didn’t like the phrasing of my apology, I immediately changed it. That’s because I’m here to debate a topic in good faith.
Now you, as some rhetorical thing, have tried to claim that it’s just like if you had made a false accusation that I had said something racist, say.
It isn’t the same, but regardless, let’s continue the analogy: take back the false accusation now, and/or apologize, just like I did.
There has been some pretty damning evidence coming out recently.
China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days
*"But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country. "
"…the memo said that “clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible.”*
The memo was sent on the same day (January 14) the WHO published the claim from the Chinese government that there was no evidence of human to human transmission.
How convenient to have supposedly sent something but I can’t read it. Stop beating around the bush.
Ah, you’re talking about your horrible racist claims about Muslims. I’ll take it back for this thread at least but you might have said it in another post somewhere. I want to be precise you know.
Should such a leak occur, I would just expect China to adjust their numbers and say, “Woops, we missed that one!” It’s not really going to prove anything, if you’re willing to buy into what China says post-hoc.
Realistically, to absolutely clinch things, you would need a leak (or recording) from someone in the leadership revealing an active intent to cover up and lie. Minus that and regardless of what information comes out - from the government or individuals - it could always be explained away through incompetence, data loss, confusion, or other things.
But we can catch them in lies through other means.
For example, according to China, Wuhan City had 6.51 hospital beds per 1,000 at the start of things:
That would be about 72,131 beds total.
They then, purportedly, added 11,537 beds via a set of temporary hospitals:
They, supposedly, built one of their temporary hospitals finishing around February 1st:
They also, supposedly, built and closed 16 separate temporary hospitals with the last closing by March 11th, just a little over a month later:
Based on American statistics, your median patient stays in hospital for about 11 days:
That gives us enough room for about 3 waves of patients to move through Wuhan’s 83.6k beds. Though, let’s say that 30% of them were used for normal, non-Covid purposes. That would mean that we should expect about 175.6k patients.
In the US, if you’re hospitalized, there’s about a 30% chance that you will end up in ICU. From there, there’s about a 50% chance that you die.
Given that China was working, in at least part, with makeshift hospitals, we should probably assume that the fatality rate was higher than 50% among those who went critical. Let’s say 65%.
So 175.6k patients go to hospital, 52.7k go critical, and 34.2k die.
Actual count, according to China: 4,512 for the entirety of Hubei province.
Alright…
Now we’re assuming that there are three waves of ill. What if they were extra nice and let everyone chill in bed for a few weeks after getting better, and only had one wave. 34.2k / 3 = 11.4k. We’re still over double the number that China reported and it’s silly to think that they let people hang out in the hospital during a crisis. At most, we might say that they only had two waves pass through - hence closing the hospitals. So a real minimum from that vantage is 17.1k for Wuhan city.
So let’s say that they didn’t use 30% of their hospital capacity for non-Covid cases. Let’s say that it was 80% of the normal hospitals. And let’s assume two waves. Now we’re looking at 51.9k who get sent to a hospital, 15.6 who go critical, and 10.1k deaths. That’s still over double what we are told.
And, China is currently telling us that many people died at home, because they couldn’t get access to a hospital.
I don’t know if they’re lying about how many beds they had or if they’re lying about the fatality count, but it would make no sense that they somehow were able to get < 4,512 deaths out of 83,600 hospital beds, given what we know about how the disease works.
That doesn’t really respond to the point though, does it? Speculating that I would handwave such evidence were it presented is not an explanation of why such evidence does not exist.
But for the record, you’re wrong: I’m asking for evidence because I want to know the truth about this.
The rest of your post is just your analysis. That’s great, but you’re not the first person to analyze this and come to such a conclusion, but we’ve been waiting rather a long time now for any evidence to support any of these analyses.
And what about the other side of the peak? If the numbers earlier were far higher than China reported, how can we reconcile that with the abrupt end of community spread?
Or do you believe that there are still thousands dying and China is somehow keeping it quiet, even despite social distancing measures being essentially rescinded?
That’s a whole string of assumptions with each assumption as the lynchpin of the next.
It may even be correct. I’m not a dumbass and I have a lot more experience with Chinese government lies and impact than prolly anyone on these boards. I’m completely open to it.
What no one is showing is what was the average monthly death rate in Wuhan for the past few years, and what is it this year?
there’s a bunch of anecdotal info, but no real data. And I have my anecdotal information from my previous company and colleagues that says BS. I’m going my my anecdotal until I see better. And I’m not seeing better than CT BS at the moment.
Just adding I talked to some ex colleagues. The dozens of factories of my former company are running at about 98% now in China. If the China factories were having outbreaks like US meat processing facilities, they would be shut down, Apple would have horrible headlines, and you would know about it.
Do a search on “covid meat processing”. Or this piece yesterday from USA Today: A rash of coronavirus outbreaks at dozens of meatpacking plants across the nation is far more extensive than previously thought, according to an exclusive review of cases by USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
Sage Rat, your whole analysis is based on patients being hospitalized because they needed critical care. Wuhan had a completely different model. In Wuhan, by a few weeks into the outbreak, they did a door to door inspection of practically every person. Any one with a fever or symptomatic went directly into one of the temporary hospitals, where they stayed for 2-3 weeks and had to test negative twice to be let out. The vast majority of those people were a) not severe b) likely had other fever causing issues and C) were not critical. Those that turned into more severe cases went to real hospitals. Nonetheless, it was hard quarantine in one of those temporary hospitals. Your assumptions a deeply flawed, and therefore your conclusions simply do not add up.
This summarizes my feelings about this and the other recent anti-China thread. There’s something pathetic and incongruous about Americans emphasizing government malfeasance in other countries.
Unless out motto going forward is to be: “America! We’re not as evil as PRC or North Korea!”
That would significantly affect the numbers, yes. But I’m sceptical that that would have had the space to do something like that.
The virus jumped to humans at the end of November. In two months, doubling every three days, you’ll have 2^20 infected (sightly over 1m) by end of January. Going through February, we can assume that they “flattened the curve” and brought the doubling rate down so that, say, it’s every six days that it doubles, so we’re looking at somewhere around 2^25 people who are infected during the time period we’re interested in (33.5m).
Wuhan only has 11m people so we probably should assume that most of the 33m are elsewhere on the planet, rather than in just Wuhan City.
Judging by New York, we should presume that about 13% of everyone would have been infected around this time, inside the city. So about 1.43m. that jives pretty well with the earlier 1m number.
80% don’t notice, 1% die. That 1% would be 14.3k. They would been somewhat less than half of all those who would have been put in ICU in America, meaning 30k, who would be about a third of all those who would be hospitalized in America, meaning 90k.