An NTD reporter had a similar idea, but focused on total deaths in the city of Wuhan rather than just flu-like deaths. A funeral home staff member said that deaths per day was 4-5 times higher than before this epidemic started, but that only 6% of those deaths were labelled as "confirmed cases" that would count toward the official numbers.
Assuming a similar rate of undercounting across other funeral homes in the city, that would put the real death count so far at about 14,000. This is despite extraordinary efforts by the Chinese government to prevent the spread of this virus.
We have no way of evaluating the truth of this claim. China has not been straightforward in its count of infections and fatalities [0]. The government has banned funerals for victims and ordered the cremation of their remains [1].
Yeah, I am very skeptical of extrapolation from deaths to get total cases. Just looking at China's numbers province by province reveals that the death rate varies quite a bit. Hubei has a very high mortality rate compared to the provinces surrounding it. Most provinces around Hubei had roughly 1 death per 1000 cases. But Henan, to the north had 22 deaths per thousand. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a titular mortality rate for these viruses.
"China is another story. Its official statistics understate the Chinese Covid death rate by 17,000% (according to The Economist’s model).
In fact, based on excess mortality calculations, The Economist estimates that the true number of Covid deaths in China is not 4,636 – but something like 1.7 million."
"Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate"
I wouldn't trust such numbers from China. Their death rate has looked like this [1] [2] since April 2020. Coincidentally, that is when covid cases began to take off in the west. China stopped adding to their death toll after they revised their numbers upwards exactly 50% (1290/2579) [3].
That makes sense. We aren't currently sure what the death rate is though. It's extremely unlikely that all cases are being reported in China, which reduces the denominator and falsely inflates the rate.
If you take Italy as example rather than China, there are 400+ cases reported, likely more existing unreported, but only 12 deaths. That's a .03% rate conservatively which is about the same as the flu (.05%), if we assume (darkly) that a few more people will die.
It's not a fantasy, but it's also not entirely malicious here.
I can't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it would list both reasons as the cause of death.
It is theorized that many doctors are listing the cause of death as pneumonia and not coronavirus because of this. It is similarly possible that some people die faster than they are able to be tested (the current test takes about 9 hours to complete).
Regardless, it would be foolish to believe this as the golden "actual" number, even ignoring the CCP's (and frankly, other countries') vested interest in fudging these numbers. It would be unlikely that it counts deaths from before the medical community recognized this virus, deaths that have occurred before test results have been returned, and deaths that have occurred outside of the healthcare system (i.e. in quarantined apartments, households, remote villages, or secretive military bases).
While 25million in 8 weeks might be exaggerated, the number reported by chinese is not credible neither.
The US flu death in 2018-2019 is estimated to be 34k. [1]
China's flu death in the same year is 144. [2]
China's population is 4x to that of US. While the numbers cannot be compared directly, the difference in magnitude says at least something about its counting methodology, if not straight out lying
If I am to extrapolate, the corona virus death in china is at least two magnitude under reported
Not based on any actual measurement of excess mortality.
They're citing a machine learning model that tries to correlate various other measures (like GDP/capita, unemployment, etc.) with mortality in some countries, and then extrapolates to every country. That model spits out ridiculous numbers for China. A normal statistician would look at that and say, "This model doesn't generalize well," not, "1.7 million people died without leaving a trace."
The best actual measurement of excess mortality in China was published in the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal).[0] It found that in the initial outbreak in early 2020, there were just under 5,000 excess pneumonia deaths. Almost all of them were in Wuhan itself. In most of China, there were actually negative excess deaths, because the lockdowns reduced flu and car crash deaths.
There is one possible explanation: China annual death rate is around 7.3 per 1000. In a city with 11 millions people (wuhan), there would be 6600 death per month without COVID 19.
> Wuhan residents are increasingly skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s reported coronavirus death count of approximately 2,500 deaths in the city to date, with most people believing the actual numbers is at least 40,000
> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival. By that estimate, 42,000 urns would be given out in the 12-day period.
Just a few sources, you can find many others if you look though.
It's of course worth noting that China is one of the countries that stopped reporting excess deaths themselves since it would be pretty obvious that if China e.g. reported a million excess deaths then the majority could likely be attributed to SARS2 (whether they die directly from the virus or starve as a result of their brutal lockdowns).
I hope and pray its not 10x and only 5x. You might be right about the state wise discrepancies, sadly don't think we will ever know the real picture, as even crematoriums are fudging records in many places. So much for being better than China.
Btw since this is HN, might there be a way to approximate the number of deaths from the size of one's social circle and the number of circle members who have passed away from covid?
The current deaths are a lagging indicator of overall mortality. A large fraction of the current infected are still at significant risk and therefore should be excluded from mortality rate estimates.
The good news is the official rate of new infections has been in steady decline and has finally dropped below 10% per day. Though that may not necessarily be completely accurate either.
Agreed but even if you think the real Wuhan death count is 10x the official (ie. ~10K deaths in Wuhan), there's still an order of magnitude lower mortality rate assuming there's been widespread exposure in the 3 months
The lack of a reputable statistic is concerning. I found the number 480,000 deaths (only U.S., not a global figure) circulating on sites including Daily Mail, Business Insider, /r/China_Flu, and abc14news.com, a domain registered in late 2018 and may or may not have any relation to ABC News the company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYYV1B1lRKY
Assuming a similar rate of undercounting across other funeral homes in the city, that would put the real death count so far at about 14,000. This is despite extraordinary efforts by the Chinese government to prevent the spread of this virus.
(NTD has an axe to grind on this issue, but they have a reputation for factual honesty. I trust NTD's numbers far more than those of the Chinese government. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ntd-tv-new-tang-dynasty/ )
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