China also likely lies about their numbers so it's not likely we'd know the real death count. According to their stats, they had covid 4 covid deaths in all of 2021. This puts them at the number 2 best results spot.
The issue here being that all the top stats spots for least deaths are from island countries, which china is not.
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].
"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"
China has 18.7% of the world's population and 0.00018% of the current coronavirus cases [0], if you believe their reported numbers. So yes, I'm willing to believe there are vastly more deaths than reported as well.
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?
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].
There maybe some merit to the claim that China is under reporting, but I haven’t seen any claim that they are under reporting by that much.
Deaths on this scale is hard to hide, even in a state controlled environment. Large cities outside of Wuhan have no seen this. I have colleagues and friends in the big cities and I haven’t heard of anyone catching let alone dying of covid.
Well, if your statement is correct, then this actually lowers their death rate, the CFR (Case Fatality Ratio).
They reported 81,285 cases. So, 81,285 + 43,000 = 124,285 cases.
And 3287 deaths. So, that’s a 2.64% death rate.
At these numbers, and with the virus now worldwide, I think China’s numbers are now irrelevant. It’s better to begin focusing our energies on mitigation and containment.
4 million with COVID, not because of. China would certainly point out that all COVID fatality data is confounded, e.g. the average age of death being above the average life expectancy in some areas. Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths.
They would also argue that they aren't responsible for western policy responses, even if those responses were inspired by theirs. Things like hunger are a side effect of lockdowns and supply chain disruptions, not directly the virus.
The true number of deaths genuinely caused by COVID that wouldn't otherwise have happened is unknown and probably always will be. It's probably in the same general area as the 4 million figure, it wouldn't be 50% or anything, but really for a virus that so heavily affects the old and co-morbid you'd need to be calculating in terms of life years lost rather than concrete "deaths". It's the latter style of counting that has led to this mass confusion in the first place.
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
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.
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
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.
More likely much higher when you start parsing how China determines COVID cases/deaths. Or those people not allowed in hospitals. There deaths do not count.. so there is a big difference but going the other way.
China is currently amidst an explosion of covid cases and deaths. Outside the first tier cities, China is still a low income country. If you look at the excess deaths numbers across nations, you will see that some kept good records, while some did not. The deaths reported through official channels are about 1/3rd of excess deaths. There is plenty of room for official reports to understate deaths, which makes it tempting for incompetent governments to minimize failures.
There was reports of people saying that they received their family members ashes. They weren’t even told they had died just receive ashes.
I don’t believe China would end up with the highest infection or highest deaths. People are quite content wearing masks and social distancing.
But I do believe the numbers are 10x lower than they are in reality.
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