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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I just ran across this link (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594) suggesting that the official numbers coming out of China may be significantly understated. I'm not familiar with the site, though - are they a reliable news source? Not sure how much credence to give it.

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The story is implausible because it rests on top-secret data about the "real" number of cases being shared with Tencent News and making it all the way to the lowly data-entry operator updating their website. All those disease-tracking websites in China I'm aware of link to a long list of local government press releases and seem to simply aggregate the numbers in those.

https://xw.qq.com/act/qgfeiyan

https://news.sina.cn/zt_d/yiqing0121

https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia

I don't believe they have privileged access to government secrets. If the government wants to hide something, the last thing they're going to do is share that data with a news org.

I don't know about those numbers but I think deaths may be considerably understated due to them only counting people who have been properly tested for coronavirus, found to have it and then died but there are probably many others who have died without being able to get a test such as the grandmother mentioned in the article. It's a bit worrying there are no figures for that - the local officials must have an idea how many extra bodies are turning up at crematoria and the like but it doesn't seem to be public.

^ This exactly. They may be accurately reporting the actual number of diagnosed cases (which I'm on the fence about), but they are certainly not reporting "suspected" cases. I understand that's hard to discern, but they should have a decent idea about the average mortality rate in the area, and be able to see an uptick that will give them a rough estimate.

Honestly I think it is hard job to get an accurate reporting giving the scale of the problem. We are talking about a single digit accuracy at the scale of 10k+. Even in H1N1 outbreaks, the medical visits and death tolls in the US was estimated with a wide band. That being said, the death of un-confirmed patients could be intentionally ignored to make the problem look not so big. But this is not a unique thing to authoritarian governments.

I think the most likely explanation for that is that they confused the numbers of quarantined->infected and infected->dead people

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