[skat20phys]

I personally don't believe them for a variety of reasons: I don't know that any country's numbers are entirely accurate, the substantial reports of active suppression of reporting about it (leaked communication, disappeared providers etc), and features of the reported data are suspicious.

On the other hand, there's probably an opportunity if not now than soon to start modeling the plausibility of Chinese reports. That is, a lot of them use China as a sort of baseline, but at some point things are going to get flipped on their head and the aggregate of other country's trends are going to start affording the ability to ask questions like "given what we know about the distribution of trajectories in other places, how plausible is it that data from country X is valid?"

There's complications due to heterogeneity in population networks, healthcare, response, etc. but I think quickly we're going to start seeing things being sorted out empirically. You can only hide things for so long.