Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LatteLazy 2240 days ago
You haven't answered the original question I asked. Does anyone here actually believe the current Chinese numbers? 4600 dead?

Until people will actually comment on that, everything else is just he said she said.

1 comments

You keep on repeating the nonsense argument that China's figures imply that only 23k people will die worldwide. When I explained exactly why that logical leap is absurd, you ignored me and repeated it again.

> Does anyone here actually believe the current Chinese numbers? 4600 dead?

I think that they are as reliable as the figures coming out of the United States. That is, they are probably in the right ballpark. As in the United States, there are probably certain categories of uncounted deaths (e.g., thousands of uncounted nursing home deaths in the US), but they probably do not change the overall numbers enough to qualitatively change any conclusions you'd draw.

Now that I've explicitly answered your question, please show some sign that you acknowledge that the logic leading from "only 4600 people have died in China" to "only 23k people will die worldwide" makes no sense whatsoever.

I don't know why you expect me to defend the 23k figure, it's whole purpose is to show how ludicrous Chinese claims are. "If everyone did as well as China" etc etc.

But that's ok, you have a different explanation for why China has apparently done amazingly well. So let's look at the numbers and quantify just how good China are, since that is why their numbers are better right?

China has 4633 deaths as of last night. They're down to 723 active cases, so for them the epidemic is basically over.

The USA has had 56009 deaths. And they're only at the start of the issue. So even ignoring the fact that China had almost 5 times as many people and less funding for healthcare and knew nothing about the disease and has had it for longer and all that, they managed to deal with it with 93% fewer deaths.

That's incredible isn't it?

But maybe the USA are just really shit at this? Trump isn't exactly a great leader right?

The UK a tiny country with a population 25 times smaller than China has 152,000 cases. Almost twice what China and the UK also has only just started to get it under control. 20732 people dead already. 5 times more than China roughly. God China are really incredibly incredibly good aren't they? A disease that's killed 20k people in the UK only killed 5k in China despite every other factor except the excellence of their leaders being against them.

We should consider the Germans to maybe? famously efficient, public health oriented, stay home order obeying Germans. They even have some of the best number for testing and treatment. No they're also way behind China with more cases and more deaths despite getting infected later and seeing what happened in Italy.

So we are forced back to the same question of opinion, but this time it's not just "is China lying or <intentional but apparently too subtle bs about only having 23k fatalities work wide>". Now you have proposed another possibility:

Either China is lying, or all the governments in the western world are so incompetent they're making this at least 10 times worse, killing 10s or 100s of thousands of their own citizens".

Can I assume your sticking to option 2?

Fewer people got sick in China, because of the extreme lock-down and quarantine measures. I've said this several times now. Are you trolling me?