There are so many rumors. But the Chinese are claiming fewer than 5,000 dead. That does not possibly seem right.
While the Chinese have a strong government that maintained very tough measures, that government is also perfectly capable of controlling information. In fact, it would darn strange if they were no keeping the real numbers secret.
Given what we know, can we assume the Chinese reports are false?
Abso-fucking-lutely not.
But life is cheap in China, and the CCP can use this as propaganda. While the EU and North American Free Trade Zone is looking at negative growth until early 21, China could be looking at 9% growth. They’ll only be limited by the lack of demand among trading partners.
This is why Trump’s threats to impose further trade restrictions are going to be met with a few snickers. We’re not in a position to threaten China anymore. We’re the ones who need masks, medical equipment, and components for our high tech gadgets. And China knows it.
And if we don’t start playing this game smarter soon, the balance of power will be permanently shifted across the Pacific.
Based on what?
Decades of history, that’s all. And the fact that they basically dragged their heels on reporting the outbreak and its extent early on tends to make anything at this point more than a little suspect.
The CCP is notoriously shady and untruthful. And they seem to enjoy playing an international politics version of the game where they hold their finger about a centimeter from your face, but say “I’m not touching you!” I can’t help but feel that it gives them the feeling that they are winning the propaganda game by reporting so few deaths and infections, versus the West who are reporting accurately.
I don’t believe them, the only thing that makes it possible that I can see, is the extent of the lockdown in Wuhan.
The people were literally forced to remain in their homes, households could only send one person out, per week for food and essentials. This caused massive hardship in a city that is larger than NYC.
Only in a totalitarian state can you have an actual lockdown like that. So in that sense, I can see China containing it that way. But then you have the situation, when you reopen if everyone isn’t virus free, you’re back to square one.
So I am thinking, no the numbers are not accurate. But it is possible, that the numbers would be lower than say, NYC because of the lockdown.
Based on the lies they told before the rest of the world even had coronavirus, and based on the fact that they’ve imposed even more draconian internet censorship policies in the last few months. It’s essentially illegal to write anything that negatively reflects on Chinese governance.
China’s CCP spin aside, the numbers just don’t add up. You’re telling me that there are only a few thousand deaths in China, which for months didn’t even acknowledge the outbreak. Considering how even in countries that do release statistics with few restrictions, the actual numbers of dead have to be revised because of earlier under counts, it’s fair to say that the death toll in China is being deliberately under-counted, probably times ten.
One thing I do believe is that China did do a pretty good job of controlling the spread after the lockdown. Nobody still knows what the real numbers are, but I do believe that the number of cases went down.
The inconsistency of the course of the outbreak in China compared with other countries.
The disease was present in the city of Wuhan from the start of December. The Chinese government did not restrict travel from Wuhan until Jan 23rd. Thousands of people were going in and out of Hubei province to other parts of China every day while the disease was spreading. It strains credulity to the breaking point that there were, for example, less than 1000 cases (and no deaths) in Jiangsu province, population 80 million.
The undercount, I would speculate, is a combination is simple error (people who died at home in their village and were never tested) and local officials making themselves look good by covering up deaths as pneumonia.
Is there anyone who believes what any government puts out as data? Their Rule #1 is always CYA.
It’s my understanding that it’s a bit more complicated than that. The Chinese central government gets their numbers from the local officials, but these same local officials are also held responsible for controlling the outbreak. So the local officials underreport the numbers to the central government, and the central government passes them on to the world.
I mean, not that the central government is necessarily displeased with reporting lower numbers either, but it might be a passive action on their part.
[On a similar note, there’s a school of thought which maintains that one reason the West was misled about Iraqi WMD was that Saddam Hussein himself believed that he had them and acted accordingly. And this was in turn because his top generals didn’t want to tell him that he didn’t.]
I agree with this. Its also a reason why so many people straved to death in the Great Leap Forward. Local officials were terrified to report true data.
This sort of thing has a long history in modern China. Jung Chang notes in her book *Wild Swans *about how Chinese local officials would pressure farmers into claiming that harvests were significantly higher than they actually were, which in turn then led to the high levels of government announcing bumper-crop harvests.
I’m honestly more intrigued by the data from Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos. Especially Vietnam, which I mostly believe.
Given that we know that the American response was late, politically compromised, and incompetent, can we assume that the Chinese were more late, politically compromised, and incompetent?
No. The assumption that everybody else is inferior to America is at best, naive, provincial, parochial. In this case, where the argument depends on shutting your eyes, covering your ears, and going “nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah” whenever the Chinese publish any information, it’s worse than that: it makes you look spiteful as well as childish.
They are not magnitude off, I’d speculate, but they are not quite right, I’ll give you that. They could and were harsh to “persuade” people to stay at home. Sometimes literally by nailing their doors (if the legends are true). Finding skeletons behind those doors will never be added to the total number, if you ask me.
I am very sorry I upset you.
First, can we agree up front that NO country is accurately counting covid deaths? Here’s a NY Times cite: The Pandemic’s Hidden Toll: Half a Million Deaths - The New York Times. And one for the UK: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/coronavirus/2020/04/why-uk-covid-19-deaths-are-being-undercounted-and-how-much
Second, in the consipiracy thread, Sage Rat did some back of the envelope calculations based on my feedback to some assumptions, and at least I settled on a couple times higher than the “official rate” for Wuhan. https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=22268399&postcount=140 Or roughly 15k dead from covid in Feb Mar.
We do know that China has opened up, people are travelling this weekend again for May Day long weekend, and there is hella contact tracing in place. The China lockdown sure appears to have at least short term burned out Covid 19
These folks are probably doing the best they can with what they have to work with.
Good heavens, the U.S. authorities are being muzzled, so what do you think is going on in China? I strongly suspect that the Chinese are infecting Uighurs, who are experiencing a Holocaust of their own right now, and then denying them treatment (and no, I do not believe that COVID was engineered in a Wuhan lab).
Certainly we can agree all these numbers from everywhere are mistaken. I suppose I ought to have asked if the Chinese numbers are obviously faked.