[lmilcin]

But I know people in the region I work with on a daily basis and by their account there are no masses of people dying everywhere and some of restrictions on movement were lifted.

If the infected population grew exponentially China would be flooded with bodies long ago but that does not seem to be what is happening.

China might not be believable in many things but it is difficult to hide millions of people sick or dying.

[LordHog]

Points taken. The CCP controls all media, the story, and the narrative. I personally don't see the infected nor the deaths in the US, but this information is disseminated through via media who gets there data from the CDC and other government agencies. The CCP hide the details about the outbreak for some time and only got out via individuals who broke the news at severe fear of being punished by the CCP.

I do work with people in China, who doesn't these days, right? They report the same thing I see which is I don't see the infected or deaths directly, unless working in health care. My industry is tech so the individuals that I work with will not have first hand accounts. They only know what the CCP informs the public and we all know it is a well formulated narrative.

I believe we will never know the true depths until the CCP is finally overthrown and details are released after that time.

[lmilcin]

I find this focus on CCP not healthy for the learning process. Certainly something to take into account but your preoccupation with it seems to be excessive.

There seems to be no reason currently to disbelieve Chinese numbers. They are encumbered by unknown, possibly very significant measurement errors, for sure, but so are european or american ones.

Due to nature of exponential growth I think it is unrealistic to believe that the virus grows rampant. All signals point to Chinese economy coming back from the nap and I find it difficult to believe that would be happening if internally Chinese state was still struggling to get the virus under control.

Just use Occam's razor. The simplest explanation, given no facts to point otherwise, is that Chinese state used its power and control over population to actually successfully push back the spread of the virus.