Darn Andrew Sullivan writes pretty.
This week he points out that New York City has 43% more dead bodies than would usually be expected. That is to say the excess 5,300 are probably due to the pandemic. This would indicate the official death toll attributed to the virus is way off.
wrong link. that’s a Biden piece
The entire region is posting numbers on worldameter averaging less than 3 deaths per million.
Our Doctor is Chinese, (very thick accent) her mother is still in China. So I asked her how her family there was doing. She said they were fine and she wasn’t worried about them because China handles things in a way that Canadians would never tolerate.
The chinese government are big fat lying liars. So, what does that make donny two scoops? The most gullible leader in the modern era?
It is all one piece, look further down.
Why the anger? I think most people with any awareness of what’s happening elsewhere know that some countries have handled this much better than the US. I’m NOT hearing much “American Exceptionalism” on this one.
But really, for all the US faults, I can’t imagine anyone thinking China is the one that got it right.
Initially, when we had little information on the virus beyond what we got from China, there was no reason to doubt the Chinese numbers. However, since then we have acquired much more information on the virus from up close.
From what we know of the lethality x infectiousness x active time in China before lockdown, the Chinese numbers seem very low. We have information from Italy, and Spain of what happens when the health care system buckles and what kind of numbers that leads to. We see from the UK, Sweden and the US what late or low levels of response leads to. We have data from Germany, Norway, Coratia, Denmark, etc what happens with a faster response, and we see from Taiwan, New Zealand and South Korea what happens with a very fast response.
Chinas stats, with the first cases in late November, human-to-human transmission confirmed on the 20 of January and quarantines and other measures implemented from January 20-23 do not seem to match our current experience with the virus. Letting it run amok for 7-8 weeks in a population dense area where (I think) people live in multi-generational households should have resulted in very different numbers when compared to other nations Covid curves.
After this point Chinas response seems to have involved a number of activities that other nations cannot or do not want to match, such as the ability to flood Wuhan with health care resources from the rest of the nation, and very severe enforcement of lockdowns and quarantines. So I can believe an atypical curve after this point. And with the information from nations which have locked down successfully, I can believe a rapid decline from this point. But those first two months… they seen really standout atypical compared to other low-response nations.
So yes, I’d be inclined to believe that the numbers are not correct and undercounted whatever the reason.
I must correct my statement above: With the new paper indicating that a much, much more infectious strain of the virus emerged in Europe and cause what we see in Italy, Spain etc it suddely does seem more believable that the Chinese numbers are real. If this turns out to be right, and China was dealing with a much less infectious strain of the virus, we would expect less deaths over time, more time before it was noticed and containment measures to be more effective.