[stone-monkey]

It should be obvious at this point that China doesn't have hundreds of thousands or millions of covid deaths the same way other non lockdown countries do. We can definitively say that based on this specific outbreak in Shanghai - There's no possible way the Chinese government could have hid outbreaks at this scale for two years now. That doesn't mean their approach didn't have problems. But whenever I see comments like this about them hiding the true covid numbers it seems in in bad faith, especially because we're looking at direct evidence in this specific case that it wouldn't have been possible for the government to do so. Are the Wuhan numbers fudged? Probably. But it's pretty clear based on the failure of zero covid to contain omicron that it more or less worked well to stop the spread against Covid zero, alpha, and delta.