Though… :smack:
The 90k would have come over several waves. So, yes, they might have been able to swing hospital quarantine.
However, we would still expect at least 10-15k fatalities.
Not sure your assumptions and do remember those temporary “hospitals”. I think we can agree if an assumption is off, it can have an exponential impact. That said using 15K incremental death from covid is 3x the official reported rate (4,636). And I think we can all agree that NY, UK and other places are at least 20% under reporting of the actual covid deaths (missing those that died at home).
I don’t know what the monthly average death rate is in Wuhan. I’m sure it is tracked but we can agree that the Chinese government and open access to data isn’t a best practice.
But, the China average death rate per thousand per year is around 7.8%. If we just use that for Wuhan and 10 m population, if my math is correct it s a monthly average death rate of 6,500/month. Add in another 7,500 for Feb and March.
You end up with about double the monthly death rate (6,500/month run rate + 7,500 covid/month) and a ballpark 30,000 deaths total in the Feb and March period.
If the crematorium capacity was roughly the 6500 monthly run rate, then it is very plausible that when things re-opened and urns could be shipped in again, that the crematorium were running 24/7 for weeks to try catch up.
The original OP is over 48k of incremental “actual deaths” from covid or 16x the official death rate when he started this thread. That’s an order of magnitude off of your back of envelopes calculation.
So, ya, I wouldn’t be surprised the actual covid deaths are a couple times higher than the official report but ~15x seems like a great exaggeration. YMMV
I just returned from a few days holiday in Zhejiang province.
I was really surprised by how back to normal things were there. In the towns I travelled in I saw many instances of *literally *hundreds of people outside dancing together (think of it as Chinese line dancing）, without wearing masks.
Before anyone says it, yes I know “hundreds” is much less than the millions of people that live in those towns. But, first of all, I mean hundreds in each group; you walk a little further down the street and find another group of hundreds of people dancing to another style of music. But secondly and more importantly, it speaks volumes about what the general public considers the risk of catching coronavirus to be at this point.
The hypothesis that the past data on coronavirus is incorrect is still fine to debate; it just lacks evidence.
But the hypothesis that China is still being ravaged by this virus, right now, is simply inconceivable at this point.
Did someone make that claim?
We should expect it to spike again at some point but, if China was sufficiently draconian in getting people to stay home, they might have been able to have eradicated the disease from their territory.
But it will come back, so long as they exist with the rest of the planet. Just the local bats in Wuhan are liable to set it off again. But, if they keep the airports closed, it could take several months to works it way over the border.
Well this thread is quite light on claims, and heavy on Just Asking Questions, so it’s worth me clarifying that no-one is suggesting that as a realistic possibility.
Besides, the numbers are linked. The position that China lied about the death rate by several times, or even an order of magnitude, and yet new cases were largely over in China by late March (IIRC), has internal consistency issues.
Agreed about a second wave, particularly after summer.
Although transmission again from bats is significantly less likely than the first time, for two reasons:
- Enforcement of wild meat trading is going to be crazy strict, at least for a few years. Even the death penalty would not be out of character for the Chinese government for something this important.
- Are bats a reservoir for Covid-19? They are (probably) the reservoir for a coronavirus that ultimately mutated into covid-19, in a human or intermediary species. But that doesn’t necessary mean they can or have caught covid-19.
Another update. Checked in with my ex colleagues. None of the dozens of factories in China have had outbreaks that have caused closures. I’m unclear if there have been zero cases, or nothing that has spread. China has been all over the factories, unlike the US and the meat processing industry.