[nik_s]

If my original post gave off the impression of being conspiracy-theory-driven, I want to apologize, because that wasn't the intent.

My original post aimed at clarifying that death rates in exponentially spreading diseases that have a lag between infection and possible recovery and death is a tricky topic, and that the numbers generally reported seem to not take this nuance into account.

I think collecting accurate data in the middle of a crisis is incredibly difficult for a host of reasons, none of which need to originate from ill intent. Test kits may be missing, data may be collected differently, methodologies for evaluating "who is infected" and "who has recovered" may differ between countries, patients' records might just not be a top priority for hospital staff, ...

[mns]

Didn't want to make it sound like you are promoting a conspiracy, sorry, it's just that everyone treats the numbers as somehow manipulated. My point is that the current numbers are all that we have - we are mostly technical people here - looking at them, there is no obvious statistical anomaly to say that yes, China is hiding something from us. Maybe the numbers are not fully accurate, and it's too early to tell, but these are the stats that we have, there is no reason for jumping on the bandwagon and questioning everything now. You can't really hide things at this global scale, no government wants to bomb its economy and cause an epidemic by hiding the infections, I just think that people/countries handling this are overwhelmed and not prepared, there is no malice. It would be good for people to be rational about this and help others be properly informed, and right now it looks more like a desire in a lot of places for something big or bad to happen, I don't see some worried, more like hungry for bad news.

[derangedHorse]

"looking at them, there is no obvious statistical anomaly to say that yes, China is hiding something from us"

Sure, but we wouldn't be able to find any statistical anomaly if China was hiding something because we simply don't have enough data ourselves to determine that.

I feel like your stance may be the opposite extreme of fear-mongering, which is downplaying the potential unreliability of data that many people have good reason to speculate about (as you might've already seen in this thread SARS cases were underreported).

[billfruit]

Yet your post seemed to hint at willful manipulation of data, which isn't something for which there is reliable concrete evidence for, and which in my view is adding to the paranoia. The line of thinking for eg:, Chinese numbers are untrustworthy, WHO numbers are untrustworthy etc, is very frequently echoed by the western press, and even here in HN.

[mensetmanusman]

People’s mistrust of China data stems from the known manipulation of economic indicators by Chinese authorities. The running assumption is that this behavior would apply to virus outbreak data, but this is unproven.

[heavyset_go]

They lied about their numbers during the SARS outbreak.

[nik_s]

I think you're referring specifically to the "political and cultural pressure in China" part of my original post. I was basing this on reporting from the New York Times [1] of the original outbreak. It very well might be that the reporting has improved since then, but I do think that there is evidence to say that there was manipulation of data, or at least a very strong incentive to under-report cases initially.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/podcasts/the-daily/corona...