[auganov]

In general I agree, it's pretty unlikely that China is anywhere in the top 10 per capita, but there's still a lot of room for a cover up.

It could very well be that China chose to sweep it under the rug and has many more people dying than reported. But the number could still be perfectly average, which is not that much. And perhaps below since most of SE Asia seems to be doing very well regardless of policy. China could have 50 times the per capita death rate and would still be below average.

Certain wards are overflowing, hospitals as a whole aren't. Many if not most didn't have that much excess mortality. Not hard to cover up at all by simply not admitting people and/or providing sub-optimal care (in which case you'd have much more effective capacity).

[yorwba]

> Not hard to cover up at all by simply not admitting people and/or providing sub-optimal care (in which case you'd have much more effective capacity).

That would create a lot of angry people who'll complain that the ward is overwhelmed, which would be counterproductive if the goal is to hide a huge case load while claiming zero local infections.

[auganov]

China is claiming 4,634 coronavirus deaths total in a population of 1.4 billion. Multiples of that are hardly a lot of people in such a vast country. Like with most healthcare systems anywhere in the world and especially in a $10k per capita country with a government-run system, care is already suboptimal, lines are long and people aren't too happy.

You don't need to tell anybody the coronavirus ward is full, they're not.

You make it hard to even get to a doctor, if they do you just send them home with a prescription. This illness progresses very fast. Many will simply die at home (which already happens everywhere, it would just happen in China at a much higher rate).

Those that call in an emergency you treat in a very suboptimal manner (untrained personnel, inadequate equipment etc) which gives you much more capacity. The reason wards are full in Western countries is higher standards and more regulation.

And again, none of what I have described is unprecedented or requires too much coordination. It's basically how the Chinese healthcare system already functions. By not doing much about the coronavirus and not giving local cases any press coverage, 90% of the "cover-up" is complete.

The only remotely conspiratorial part is not properly coding deaths as COVID. But then again, we already see large discrepancies in how countries code deaths for perfectly legitimate reasons.

[xster]

Are you referencing something specific?