If 3 million people had died in China of covid, they wouldn't be able to hide it. Even if they could hide that level of deaths, that level of covid spread would be obvious from antibody tests from peoe traveling from China.
Given how China repeatedly covered up COVID from early on...I think the starting point is assuming that the numbers coming out of there are not accurate.
> this level of spread would be trivial to infer from antibody tests of people traveling to China.
Any crunching of what numbers? You and I have no idea how many Chinese people have been infected or died of COVID.
As recently as earlier this week the Chinese Gov’t was claiming 130k infections in Shanghai with zero deaths. Are those the numbers you’re trusting, or were you counting the pyres visible on satellite photos from areas that had ‘no COVID’ according to the CCP?
While I think China is hiding the number of infected, it'd be pretty hard to hide the proportion of dead to infected as the virus has already escaped Wuhan.
A lot of people say China undercounted but according to WHO report China when it was at peak infection had started counting as confirmed cases that showed lung damage using chest scans instead of doing a proper test as they needed a quick turnaround on test results. Which to me doesn't sound like they wanted to hide the number of infected. Over the years I have realised we have western propaganda and Chinese propaganda and the truth dies somewhere in between
This is interesting. China can't cover up the true scale of the outbreak because the rate of infection overseas quickly gives the game away if they are publishing very low estimates of domestic infection.
If you don't believe the numbers, ask anyone you know who has relatives in China.
Lockdowns, or mass hospitalizations/deaths from Covid are a bit difficult to hide from the people living through it, if either of those two things are happening, everyone would hear about it through the grapevine.
Given how quickly the virus spreads, given that China stopped all of its lockdowns in May, and given the nature of exponential growth, if China were lying about its numbers, by this point, they would have tens or hundreds of millions of cases.
If that were the case, your Chinese coworker with family back home would have known about their entire extended family getting sick.
... Yet, their extended family is not sick, and life in China goes on as normal.
What is the most plausible explanation for this?
PS. China's self-reported IFR was ~6%. If they are making up all the numbers, do you think they might have fabricated a lower number?
Those numbers are likely at least an order of magnitude underreported. They mirror the figures out of China, and there are a number of issues:
1. They follow a quadratic distribution over time with a regression coefficient of >.99. that's now how epidemics spread
2. China ran out of testing kits weeks ago.
3. Half of the population is on lockdown, and according to Chinese reports, even those who are sick and need to go to the hospital are not allowed to travel. So cases are not being counted
4. Even if they were able to do so, hospitals have been overwhelmed for weeks and have been turning cases away
In addition to other reasons, the authoritarian CCP has shown a willingness to punish anyone who speaks toward how severe this infection actually is and their numbers absolutely cannot be trusted. Just look at the unprecedented response - 700 million people, 10% of the world's population, is under lockdown.
That and there was some news around that China’s infection rate matches the daily manufacturing supply of testing kits. With there not being enough kits to test patients.
Videos from China locals do show way more dead than the official numbers.
The fact that only 3 deaths have occurred outside of China (and the vast majority in Wuhan is an important metric in assessing how the virus spreads and how effective or not containment policies have been. There are many, many Chinese people who live outside of China, and emphasizing that the virus is heavily contained in the country of its origin is pretty relevant to anyone who hasn’t visited China recently.
The scary part is that of the official 8,200 or so people that have been confirmed to have the virus there's been 171 deaths, and 143 recoveries. So more people dead than recovered, does make one wonder about the 8,200.
Seems few believe the official numbers, people visit numerous hospitals without being able to seen, and even those that get seen have problems getting tested, and people who posts about the situation get the post pulled or pressured to pulled themselves.
Here's an article describing the censorship (pulled posts), arrests for "rumor mongering", difficulty in getting tested, etc:
"How does China not have mass deaths atm then? They have lied a lot in Wuhan, but they can't outright hide mass kill offs."
They have almost certainly hidden mass deaths:
"WUHAN COVID-19 DEATH TOLL MAY BE IN TENS OF THOUSANDS, DATA ON CREMATIONS AND SHIPMENTS OF URNS SUGGEST"
I am not accepting it as gospel, just saying that it is exceedingly likely that china did avert 3 million deaths. The only counter suggestion is that they somehow managed to cover up these 3 million deaths and the associated covid spread.
So the argument is that the lockdown secretly failed, but we somehow missed in all antibody tests from travelers in China the widespread covid infection and we also missed all the 3 million deaths?
Data from China is how we even got the sequence for the virus in the first place.
If 3 million people had died in China of covid, they wouldn't be able to hide it. Even if they could hide that level of deaths, that level of covid spread would be obvious from antibody tests from peoe traveling from China.
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