[usaar333]

> Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence.

Well, this jibes with reality.

I could care less about actual case counts - few countries are close to having the capacity to test everyone so who cares.

What is a huge problem with China is the death statistics. Looking at Lombardy with 6k+ deaths with the outbreak not yet peaked, am I really supposed to believe that only 2.5k died in Wuhan (similar population)? The CFR outside Hubei is ridiculously low - only 1 death out of 1200 cases in Zhejiang (!)?

During China's outbreak, there were additionally lots of accusations of case data being completely made up (insufficient variance in daily numbers) and looking at basically every other country's quite noisy reports today, that was almost certainly true.

The implications are pretty vast: China's reporting actually made the disease seem less urgent than it really was. Perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved had they been more transparent.

[GuB-42]

China locked down Wuhan much earlier than Italy did. And they did it harder. Totalitarian states have an advantage in situations like that.

The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate. Case fatality rates go from less than 1% to more than 10%. In France, on the official website where they give the numbers, it is clearly written "we don't test everyone, the actual number of cases is higher", and deaths are "of COVID-19 patients dying in hospitals". All numbers are made up, because there is no way to know the actual numbers.

And don't tell me that anything after January was China's fault. It is not like governments around the world didn't know what happened there. Maybe the general public wasn't well informed but it is trivial for a government to be aware of an event of such scale. No, China may be to blame for the initial cases, but for the pandemic phase, it is completely our fault.

[viklove]

China has a long, long history of suppressing access to information though. Not just in reporting false data, but also in limiting the press from investigating issues themselves. Are you honestly saying that Japan and the US have a comparable history?

> And don't tell me that anything after January was China's fault. It is not like governments around the world didn't know what happened there.

Both are possible, and both are very likely. China suppressed information to save face, and many other countries were incompetent in responding to the information they did have access to.

[rfoo]

> Are you honestly saying that Japan and the US have a comparable history?

This is exactly the point of parent comment: people are simply repeating the same narrative based on "the history" as if we are still in cold war and it is impossible to know what really happened in China, while this is no longer true.

Surely the situation is not ideal, in that you still need hours to read between lines and investigate, China must improve on this, but the virus just showed us one thing: being dismissive about anything coming out of China may lead to a global disaster. We should either try to understand, or cut ties with China.

[throwaway_pdp09]

> We should either try to understand

Try to understand, precisely, what?

[rfoo]

Try to understand what happened in China, what is happening and what does all these mean, instead of being dismissive on anything coming out of China, claiming they are lies and propaganda.

[eeeuo]

It is impossible to trust information that comes out of country that suppresses freedom of the press.

It's a very simple cause-and-effect.

[throwaway_pdp09]

> what happened in China

covid

> what is happening

covid

> what does all these mean

No idea, what does all these mean?

> instead of being dismissive

I didn't dismiss, I asked. Answer the question.

> claiming they are lies and propaganda

No, you just said that. I asked a question. Answer the question please, to wit, What am I being asked to understand.

[dirtyid]

Trump has elevated Chinese issues into familiar grievance politics that many people are unable to assess the situation impartially. I've seen so many posts on western social media of conditions in quarantined Chinese cities being suppressed or dismissed as propaganda/shill that people are failing to accept reality, deluding themselves into unpreparedness. Also many are simply ignorant of Chinese-western relationship dynamics to comment usefully.

The fact is, China has always been on don't trust and verify relationship. You don't listen to what they say, but watch what they do. And China is one of the most watched country by foreign analysis and intelligence officials everywhere. If shutting down a city and then the country is less of an urgent indicator than their numbers collated together during an uncharted event, then you're focusing on the wrong thing. This is well understood by people in China policy who cultivate relationships with Chinese counterparts as part of intelligence gathering... intelligence that countries failed to act on. For example the Chinese CDC was basically modeled after and trained by the US CDC. There are many unofficial channels between Chinese and HK/Taiwan/US medical communities which is one reason why HK and Taiwan was so ahead of the curve. There's also thousands of expats in China and millions of Chinese diaspora with connections to the mainland. There's no shortage of information on a massively public crisis like this, there are only people who don't know how to look, or looked and decided to ignore what they found. And more disconcertingly, on a diplomatic level between western countries - the possibility that information isn't being shared behind the usual channels because lack of US leadership in the last few years has undermined world order.

[j_koreth]

A source on recent press expulsions in China.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/business/media/china-expe...

[dntbnmpls]

And the US expelled chinese journalists as well

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/washington-sla...

Of course we play it off as being "fair" and setting quotas.

[malandrew]

> The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate.

There's a huge difference between accuracy and unadulterated deception. If the numbers are off by 10%, you can claim it's inaccurate, but if the numbers are off by a lot more, it starts moving into deception territory. Right now, assuming the stories about urns being delivered to funeral homes are accurate, it sounds like numbers might be off my 2x or more. That's deception.

[rfoo]

Maybe. But it is really hard to find an explanation on why every medical statistics (severe rate, hospitalization rate, death rate, average time in hospital, average recovery time, etc) seems to hold true and verified by other countries, and they can still fake their death count (and only death count).

On the other hand, the number of urns being delivered to funeral homes can be easily explained. For example, the urns story talks about a fact, the amount of empty urns being delivered to funeral homes exceeds death count. But selling urns is marketized and people could pick their preferred combination of style, size and price, so this can be well explained. The story then goes ahead and matches this fact-based but pointless number with "random users on social media claims 3500 urns will be delivery daily during next two weeks". I mean, that's smelly.

[throwaway_pdp09]

> seems to hold true and verified by other countries

Sure they were.

[rfoo]

Mind giving an example of what doesn't match?

[tensor]

China's reporting in no way made it seem less urgent. The reported fatality rate hasn't significantly changed from their reports.

[viklove]

They're reporting 2.5k deaths in Wuhan, while most estimates and other sources put it closer to 20k+. A factor of 10 isn't much of a change?

[dboreham]

Everything I've seen matches up with the Chinese data (when adjusting for test coverage for mild symptom patients). Where are you seeing this 10x higher number?

[viklove]

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wuhan-residents-dismiss-...

> Wuhan residents are increasingly skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s reported coronavirus death count of approximately 2,500 deaths in the city to date, with most people believing the actual numbers is at least 40,000

https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-covid-19-death-toll-may-tens-...

> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival. By that estimate, 42,000 urns would be given out in the 12-day period.

Just a few sources, you can find many others if you look though.

[rfoo]

The two links seems to point to the same source, and:

> Trucks dropped off roughly 2,500 urns on Wednesday and again on Thursday local time to one of the eight local funeral homes, a driver told Chinese media outlet Caixin. The news site also published another photo showing 3,500 urns stacked inside the facility. The number of urns that arrived in that one funeral home was far greater than the city's official overall death COVID-19 toll.

Note that the numbers given are for EMPTY urns.

> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival.

Note that this is based on "some random Wuhan residents playing numbers on social network".

[viklove]

> some random Wuhan residents playing numbers on social network

Yeah, when the government hides information and imprisons journalists, that's all we're left with, isn't it?

They're not the same source, by the way. They're multiple different community sources reporting the same information.

[tensor]

I don't deal in speculation and rumours sorry. The 2-3% assuming you have medical treatment has held true. The 10+% hospitalization has held true.

The lack of response from the US is in no way due to China's reporting, it's due to the US propaganda and incompetence.

[droopyEyelids]

In December, China's influence caused the WHO -not- to report human to human transmission. This was despite the known infection of healthcare workers, and counter to the reports made from Taiwan.

Human-human transmission is one of the fundamental elements used to determine the urgency of an outbreak.

[rovolo]

I'm looking at the timeline on wikipedia, and it looks like you should be saying 'January' instead of 'December':

Dec 30: The Wuhan Municipal Health Committee reported to the WHO that 27 people had been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown cause.

Dec 31: China contacts the WHO and informs them of "cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan".

Jan 4: The WHO waited for China to release information about the "mysterious new pneumonia virus".[51] The United Nations agency activated its incident-management system at the country, regional and global level and was standing ready to launch a broader response if it was needed.

Jan 9: The WHO confirmed that the novel coronavirus had been isolated from one person who had been hospitalised. The WHO also reported that Chinese authorities had acted swiftly, identifying the novel coronavirus within weeks of the onset of the outbreak, with the total number of positively tested people being 41. The first death from the virus occurred in a 61-year-old man who was a regular customer at the market.

Jan 14: Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO's emerging diseases unit said that there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus, mainly small clusters in families, adding that "it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission"

Jan 20: After two medical staff were infected in Guangdong, China announced that the virus was human-to-human transmissible … the WHO has said [it] is deeply concerning and could signal evidence of a much larger outbreak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...

China probably could have informed people earlier, but it seems easier to not tell the WHO than to pressure the WHO to keep a secret. Also, there's a difference between possible human-to-human and confirmed human-to-human transmission.

[rfoo]

Hello, would you please link us to the report made from Taiwan which reports H2H transmission in Dec 2019? My Google-fu failed me on this, thanks!

[homarp]

https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...

Taiwan says WHO failed to act on coronavirus transmission warning: relationship with Beijing blamed for not sharing alert over human-to-human infection

without paywall: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-03-24/taiwan...

"We asked them whether there's a possibility of human-to-human transmission. We indeed asked them and reminded them of the matter," Chou said. He said the WHO confirmed it had received the letter but did not respond to it.

[rfoo]

Thanks for the non paywall-d link, that's an interesting read, also previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22712971

Kudos to Taiwan for reminding WHO an unknown virus, just like any other virus, may possibly be H2H-transmissible!

[bogomipz]

>"Well, this jives with reality."

You want "jibes" here. Jive means to talk nonsense:

https://www.grammarbook.com/homonyms/jibe-jive.asp

[StavrosK]

Plus, "couldn't care less", though I'm fighting a losing fight.

[neltnerb]

Maybe they could care less? Yes, it's a losing fight.

Of course, it's probably more literally true that they could care less, after all, they care enough to post about it on the internet. They probably don't do that for... um... articles about the 1984 Honda Accord after all?

Oh English.

[StavrosK]

Think of "I could go out less", "I could eat less", "I could spend less", etc. All these phrases clearly imply that you're overdoing it now and need to stop. "I could care less", as used, means the opposite, that they don't care almost at all.

Your explanation is a retcon.

[neltnerb]

... that was the joke. But I agree jokes are better when they're explained (not kidding).

Of course, if enough people start saying "I could care less" I guess they get to decide what it means. Living languages are literally awesome.

[wahern]

Here's a good thread on the issue, with Google Ngram evidence for the original phrase (we know which one that is ;), and another post with a hypothesis, echoed in a couple of subsequent posts, for the emergence of the rephrasing: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283149/when-did-...

That rephrasing hypothesis is the best I've seen yet, but still not especially persuasive.

[tigermelon]

Sorry, I have to.

"I could care less" can mean "I could (stand to) care less".

As in, "The amount I could care about this is zero because it's so irrelevant, but in responding to this discussion or otherwise engaging the topic, I have exhibited a bit of care, albeit undue."

For fun, I sometimes like to propose this to anyone who brings it up, but I could care less whether people say "could" or "couldn't". :)

Edit: Hah! neltnerb gets me :)

[StavrosK]

"I could care less" could mean anything other than "I don't care completely", including "I care passionately about this, it is the thing I care most about", thus making it meaningless. If I said "I could work less", would you assume I meant "I work almost zero hours"?

[tigermelon]

True there's ambiguity there and the sentence alone really only conveys that the topic isn't one that the stater wants to focus on any further at the moment.

Generally however, I think there's some assumption or perhaps prior demonstration that implies a lack of care to start.

It's tough to describe. "I could care less what you do with your money" may come with a long understood history that not much care was given to this topic the past (i.e. we haven't discussed it before), and if we are now arguing about it because because some prior discussion escalated, I am indicating that I preferred the status quo with that statement (albeit in a way that probably doesn't defuse tensions in this particular example :).

[StavrosK]

There are two ways to look at this: What the words actually communicate, and what you know them to mean. If you told an alien "I could care less", they would have very little information as to your state of caring. Therefore, the phrase fails in that respect.

If, on the other hand, you treat it as a nonsensical synonym for "I don't care", then the phrase would well have been "gooble gooble goo" and it would make no difference, since everyone knows what you mean when you say it.

I find arguing its correctness moot because there's no way to spin the sentence to be correct. At most, you can say "well, you got the point", and that's the end of it, at least when you're dealing with a descriptivist (which you aren't, in this case).

[Cpoll]

If on the other hand you said "I could work less," I would assume that (note the italics).

[MobileVet]

"Oh stewardess... I speak Jive" https://youtu.be/g0j2dVuhr6s?t=58

[basementcat]

Jus' hang loose, blood. She gonna catch ya up on da rebound on da med side.

[derefr]

Huh. I figured that "jive" was a musical term first-and-foremost, and therefore to say "jiving with" was a bit like saying "grooving with" or more generally "in sync with."

But apparently the use of the word "jive" to mean "talking nonsense" is the older, original usage, and the type of music/dance is named after the term, rather than the other way around. TIL.

[bogomipz]

No I think its the other way around. "Jive" was still in use up until the late 70s - The Bee Gees hit "Jive Talkin'" and a well-known scene form the comedy movie "Airplane" both being examples. It is/was almost always used in connection with speaking i.e "don't jive talk me"

The earlier musical dance/reference is the really just the Johnny Otis song which is actually just a Bo Diddley rip-off:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxU995zbfno

[usaar333]

thanks for the tip; will edit

[pas]

What was the average age in Wuhan?

[mdpopescu]

Maybe the Chinese actually counted the people dying of the flu, instead of every death where the deceased also had the virus.

[dboreham]

It seems that if you have the virus in your body (test positive), and you die, then with a high probability the virus caused your death (since it only stays in the body for ~10 days).

[malandrew]

Yes, but if you have comorbidities, it's easy for people to claim the cormorbidity is the cause of death.

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

Honestly does anyone believe China’s death statistics? I think the west believes than more than even those living under communist rule in China, and that says a lot.

[bigpumpkin]

These claims have no basis in facts. The case fatality rate varies greatly depends on whether the health capacity is being overwhelmed, because when you don't have enough ICU beds or ventilators, your seriously ill patients cannot live. Lombardy experienced a greater strain on its medical system than Wuhan ever did. China sent 40,000 medical professionals from the rest of the country to Wuhan where has Lombardy had little outside aid. China also had universal masking whereas Italy never did. The real case count in Italy is in the 7 figures.

When you do widespread testing as China did in Zhejiang you can find a lot of mild cases. Indeed, Iceland, which did the same, has 1020 cases and 2 deaths.

[Majromax]

> When you do widespread testing as China did in Zhejiang you can find a lot of mild cases. Indeed, Iceland, which did the same, has 1020 cases and 2 deaths.

Two significant notes, however:

* China reports that its outbreak has largely resolved. The vast majority of the 1,000 cases in Iceland are still active, so we don't know how many deaths Iceland will eventually have. South Korea's current fatality rate still seems to be around 1%, with many cases yet to resolve.

* China seems to include only symptomatic cases in its total. That should bias its fatality rate upwards, since the denominator does not include any asymptomatic people who resolved without developing a full case of COVID-19. (Note that this will also be true for jurisdictions that require symptoms for testing. I believe that SK tested many asymptomatic people, but the US for example is not.)

Note that the 1%CFR estimates are based on full access to medical resources. When medical systems are overwhelmed as in Italy, we expect that number to increase from that baseline. Jurisdictions that report a markedly lower fatality rate are likely to have had systematic problems in identifying or reporting on case totals.

[bigpumpkin]

Guangdong China: 320,000 tests by Feb 28,

2820 positive cases.

Positive rate: 0.8%

Iceland: 3,787 tests by March 18,

330 positive cases.

Positive rate: 8.7%

Clearly Guangdong did more testing with respect to its epidemic than Iceland.

Let's look at New York State:

172,360 tests by March 29,

59513 positive cases

Positive rate: 34.5%

[jariel]

Iceland as of March 30 has done 16K tests. Which is 45K/million people (4.5% of their entire pop), they have 6.6% infection rate. [1]

Hubei population is 60M. So they'd have to do 2.7 Million tests to have the same degree of testing at Iceland.

Even with an excessive lockdown, it seems that just on this issue alone, China's numbers look really quite wrong.

That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and almost no deaths look very suspicious.

Combined with the fact that all public Chinese information is part of an 'orchestration of public opinion' (i.e. propaganda effort) and is not based in any reality, so of course, there's a credibility problem to begin with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing

[bigpumpkin]

"Even with an excessive lockdown, it seems that just on this issue alone, China's numbers look really quite wrong."

So you are saying that countries and regions that are under-testing relative to Iceland all have numbers that are wrong?

"That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and almost no deaths look very suspicious."

That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country outside of Hubei. The number of cases never exceeded 3,000 in any other province.

[jariel]

"are saying that countries and regions that are under-testing relative to Iceland all have numbers that are wrong?"

No, I'm saying that Iceland's numbers are strong, that they compare remotely well with most other nations (ie more testing, lower rate of infection), all of which, when taking together, make China's numbers look fabricated.

"That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country outside of Hubei."

3000 is an enormous number of cases, tantamount to a 'major outbreak'.

[usaar333]

Do you believe Zhejiang was as widely tested as Iceland? Their fatality rates are lower than the widely tested Iceland (or literally anywhere in the world), which still has a pandemic ongoing. In fact none of the province numbers are believable (https://bnonews.com/index.php/2019/12/tracking-coronavirus-c...), with only Beijing and Henan barely in the "unlikely but possible" category.

Wuhan's medical system was in complete crisis between lockdown and when the first field hospital opened 1.5w after: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047613/chin.... There's reports of entire families dying at home (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/18/coronavirus-ki...) -- I am quite doubtful Lombardy has been hit harder than Wuhan.

I will admit I'm wrong if China runs serological tests on Wuhan to determine the percent that were infected. I'll be extremely surprised if they do because the data will prove the point above (my guess? it would show 1M+ were infected, meaning only 2500 deaths was impossible).

[bigpumpkin]

The low rate of deaths in the rest of China shows that the lockdown of Wuhan works. The rest of China never had that many cases.

Death being concentrated in one region is not an exclusive phenomenon in China. If you look at Korea's stats you'll realize there many provinces with zero deaths[1]:

Incheon: 58 cases, 0 death Seoul: 426 cases, 0 death Gyeongnam 95 cases, 0 death Ulsan: 45 cases, 0 death Chungbok: 44 cases, 0 death Sejong 46 cases, 0 death Deajeon: 45 cases, 0 death Chungnam: 127 cases, 0 death Jeonbuk: 13 cases, 0 death Gwangju: 20 cases, 0 death Jeonam: 9 cases, 0 death Jeju: 9 cases, 0 death Airports: 202 cases, 0 death

Deaths are only concentrated in 5 regions:

Daegu: 6624 cases, 111 deaths Gyeongbuk: 1298 cases, 38 deaths Gyeonggi: 463 cases, 5 deaths, Busan: 118 cases, 3 deaths Gangwon: 36 cases, 1 death

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...

[taylodl]

That's interesting. I had not heard that but that raises the question of where did those 40,000 medical professionals practice medicine? Where did China get all their ventilators and PPEs? Did they need them? Once this is all over I hope all the countries get together and compare notes and experiences so we're all better prepared for the next pandemic.

[unsignedchar]

In most of the world, the lack of preparation seems to be more for structural and political reasons than due to lack of knowledge.

NYT had a fascinating story on an effort in the US to scale up production of ventilators, that produced nothing in 14 years

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...

[zaroth]

> I could care less about actual case counts - few countries are close to having the capacity to test everyone so who cares.

Indeed, the total positive test count tells you more about changes in your testing capacity and testing criteria than it tells you about the infected population. I suppose it’s helpful in establishing the lower bound, but with no error bars on the possible upper bound.

Testing a statistically valid random sample of the population would be neither difficult or expensive. Running these tests every few days across every major metropolitan areas would be extremely useful data to report the current active infection rates.

This is useful even without an antibody test, but of course much more useful with an antibody test, because then you know not just active infection percentages but total infected percentages.

I can’t begin to speculate why this data is either not being collected or not being made available.

Death rate is somewhat useful but very lagging and also limited by not knowing the true IFR.

The only other proxy we have for guessing the total infection rate in a population is the percentage of positive tests. In NY there are districts which have 50% of tests coming back positive, which is so high as to be almost unbelievable. If that data is correct and at all indicative of the general population, it is, counter-intuitively, extremely good news.

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...