Last year the Economist estimated them at about 1.7 million excess mortality. There is extremely strong pressure from the top down to minimize the public death count. The credibility of the party (and Xi personally) relies on their Zero Covid policy being seen as effective. I wouldn't even call it a cover up, there are just no incentives to accurately report and many reasons to downplay aggressively.
How do you explain a skyrocketing death count that flat lines to zero the same day people were getting arrested for reporting on the censorship and coverups that had been going on since late 2019 when Wuhan doctors were raising the alarm?
Do you genuinely believe China has had zero covid deaths since 4/19/20 and has not done any coverups or censorship regarding covid?
My take is that if my government managed to successfully lie about the number of deaths (assigning COVID-19 as the reason only in cases where the patient had no chronic illnesses) then China is more than capable of doing the same and has a major incentive to do so.
5 days to report the case to national authorities and to the WHO.
Okay, there are sources out there that state that the first case may be from as early as mid-November. But come on: it's a new virus. They had no idea what this is until late December. It's literally recognizing a needle in a haystack while not knowing that there's a needle. What can you reasonably expect from them?
> The press has also recently tried to float the conspiracy theory that the US government planted the virus in Wuhan back in October.
That's not what China claims.
China says this is a possibility that the virus naturally originated from the US. Huge difference from "planting". This claim is based on DNA research of the virus, as well as timing:
1. The US seems to have older generations of the virus than China. How I have no idea how they identify virus generations but supposedly it is possible to see this in the DNA. Maybe someone who is more knowledgeable can fill in.
2. The start of the virus coincided with some military games event where the US army visited Wuhan.
China is not saying the US engineered and planted the virus. It is saying the virus might naturally have started in the US, where it went undetected and brushed away as an abnormally bad flu season.
Now, this is still very much speculation and there's no hard evidence, I will give you that. But the US CDC isn't exactly doing a good job with investigating the general situation in the US population. This claim by China is easily refuted so why isn't the US doing it?
Again: I get that you dislike China, but that's no reason for throwing exaggerated or wrong accusations around.
There's also a "Schroedinger's China" problem here with the argument that China is covering up a massive number of deaths.
If they'd already been hammered by coronavirus and covered it up, then they'd have high levels of natural immunity and wouldn't need to be pursuing this zero covid policy.
It just doesn't add up. They tried covering up in Wuhan and that failed miserably. After the initial wave most China went basically without any restrictions, even with Delta which was much more contagious and deadly than the Wuhan strain. There's just no way that went around without anyone noticing.
This all sounds exactly how i imagine the Chinese regime is attempting to cover up how many Corona related deaths they actually have. Except nobody wants to be that person who leaks the story.
It's a theory that there's a broad conspiracy to cover up how bad the pandemic hit China. This would require many parties (millions of people inside and out of China) to closely conspire on a singular manufactured narrative and prevent any leaks of the "truth".
While im extremely skeptical of China's numbers (by default it's safer to assume that all known case counts in any country are well off the real numbers of cases that haven't been counted) China did use far harsher measures to stop spread (the biggest, most total quarantine of hundreds of millions of people, applied in just weeks), while the U.S has so far not done that or anything close to it, and was very slow even to react to the extent that it has so far.
This could thus partly be a case of accusing the other side of lying because you look so bad that blame needs to be spread around even if they did things differently to mitigate their situation better (maybe).
Also, China published the vast majority of major case growth/death figures before they (or anyone else really) knew just how bad things would get in Italy, Spain and other countries, yet their mortality rates more or less match a certain global average (they're in fact a bit worse than average) so why would they have lied in such a specific but also partially statistically realistic way? Why not publish less cases and lower death figures if they were going to lie their asses off anyhow?
I don't think they're telling the truth, especially about total known cases and total deaths, but maybe they didn't conceal quite as badly as claimed, and harsher measures partly explain the differences in numbers between the U.S and China.
Most of all though, it's important to know if whatever concealment they did also distorted: 1. claimed mortality RATE, and 2. if the spread of the virus has been more or less contained finally, as they claim it has. These two are the most important things, more important than actual numbers being off by some margin or another.
China didn't get over COVID-19. They're still seeing double-digit deaths daily and new infections. They're going to see recurring new networks and pockets appear repeatedly. Endlessly if the virus has endured in other countries. They aren't coming out on top of this, especially given the absolutely enormous GDP damage they've already endured.
What do you have in mind by "telling everyone they have the virus under control"? I don't recall any such communication from China.
If you mean the cover-up or data fudging accusations, I highly recommend the four part series in Quillette that examines the merit of these charges. It's very long, however.
"Again, I know that many of you are skeptical, but this essay has required a ridiculous amount of work and I'm really confident about the conclusions I reach, so I hope you will read it with an open-mind. I will post the other parts in this thread as they are published."
Mixing facts and lies, and write unintentional things as if they were intentional is really the best way misinform people.
I really don't see why should China try to hide an outbreak. China will be, and is hurt the most without a doubt. China isn't mother nature, you can't just assume its government is somewhat almighty, knows everything before its happened and blame it for not doing anything. No government can be that.
It should be obvious at this point that China doesn't have hundreds of thousands or millions of covid deaths the same way other non lockdown countries do. We can definitively say that based on this specific outbreak in Shanghai - There's no possible way the Chinese government could have hid outbreaks at this scale for two years now. That doesn't mean their approach didn't have problems. But whenever I see comments like this about them hiding the true covid numbers it seems in in bad faith, especially because we're looking at direct evidence in this specific case that it wouldn't have been possible for the government to do so. Are the Wuhan numbers fudged? Probably. But it's pretty clear based on the failure of zero covid to contain omicron that it more or less worked well to stop the spread against Covid zero, alpha, and delta.
China’s zero COVID efforts and policy seem to be real, not made up.
However given there have been a number of small outbreaks they have either been very lucky it has never spread to a vulnerable person or they have covered up several deaths over the last year.
Western journalists and businessmen are on the ground throughout the country (not to mention family ties and communications between expat Chinese and their families) and if there were a major outbreak of COVID killing dozens or hundreds, i dont think they’d be able to cover it up.
I understand why you would think this might be the case - but please consider the logistical difficulties of such a vast conspiracy.
There's over a billion people in China, with an extensive diaspora that keeps in touch with family back home. The world is connected, and we aren't living in 1929 anymore (Where your entire extended family could have starved to death, and you wouldn't hear about it for a decade.)
What exactly do you think is happening there? They've lifted the lockdowns - and if the virus were still circulating through the community, it should have infected tens of millions of people by now. Do you think that millions of people are getting sick and dying, and their overseas relatives, who are frequently in touch with them, don't know about it?
They've tried to suppress COVID information, when only thousands of people were infected in January, and... Everybody still knew about it.
Do you think they are somehow orders of magnitude more successful at doing so in September, while secretly having millions and tens of millions of cases?
Or is the more plausible explanation that they probably don't have millions and tens of millions of cases?
Or, alternatively, do you think that they only have tens and hundreds of thousands of cases (Few enough to suppress information on), and somehow, despite the lockdowns being lifted, they aren't ballooning into millions?
Really? My starting point is that the Chinese government would likely cover up being blamed for a deadly pandemic that has killed millions.
They haven't even admitted their COVID death statistics since early on last year: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda759474...
They stopped counting COVID deaths after the first 100k or so... in February.
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