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Comment by woutr_be | Hacker News Reader

Not to start a political conversation, but why are Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau not listed as separate countries? All 3 have their own measurements and cases, surely that shouldn't be included with data from China...

Not only that, it gives a false perception of what's going on in those areas. Macau only has 10 confirmed cases, with everyone recovered. Hong Kong and Taiwan both have less than 200 cases, definitely a much different situation than in Mainland China.

EDIT: I see they have a separate option to show by province / autonomous region, specifically for China.

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It's just sad that when we point out the obvious, the pro-dictatorship camp just dismisses it by saying "don't politicize science". But this data is in fact the result of politicized science.

By bootlicking China, WHO is just expensing her own credibility. Many no longer follow the authority of WHO. For example, many countries started restricting travel from China[0] to give themselves more time to prepare when WHO opposed it[1]. Experts had long questioned WHO's decision to refuse to declare it a pandemic[2], before WHO's late announcement yesterday.

There are some efforts to stop the ripple of this China political power play, particularly by Taiwanese and Hong Kongers[3]. We should all be more alert.

[0] https://fortune.com/2020/02/06/countries-china-travel-restri...

[1] page 5 of https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...

[2] https://time.com/5798797/un-who-coronavirus-outbreak-classif...

[3] https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/pull/418

Almost every other data source lists Macau, Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries, and for good reason.

China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan all publish their own individual statistics, why would the WHO aggregate them into one.

> https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/pull/418 I hate to disagree, but they should be listed as separate countries.

yeah it's especially idiotic when a freaking cruise ship gets its own entry but an independent country-island doesn't.

And bootlicking certainly puts you at hazard of obtaining the coronavírus.

Sorry, I know jokes are frowned upon here.

Doesn't seem unreasonable; the "W" in WHO stands for World. They aren't here to report on city states and islands. Even if those city states and islands are well run politically independent entities.

Well, they listed a cruise ship. Singapore, Bahrain, San Marino(!), occupied Palestinian territories, Liechtenstein, etc are listed too and they re all tiny islands or city-states.

The only reason WHO is not listing HK and TW separately is to avoid displeasing China.

They should be listed separately as in the fight against the virus they act as independent entities using their own resources and local policies. These actions have no relation to the political claims made by China over these territories. China is making everything into a political issue, so

They made choices for reasons. Borders aren't a universal truth, countries disagree on these matters and the WHO has to work with that because they are a global entity.

It is obvious why it happened, but it is nevertheless perfectly reasonable. If anything the Europeans are the problem; resisting being aggregated into sensible units. But nobody begrudges them that.

> They should be listed separately as in the fight against the virus they act as independent entities using their own resources and local policies.

Don't the Scots have their own health system? Maybe Scotland should be listed separately from England?

The situation reports list Occupied Palestinian territory separately; they probably aren't going it alone. Maybe the WHO should have merged them?

There is no end to the nitpicking that is possible. There isn't anything particularly important in the aggregations they are using.

While they're at it they can fold UK's numbers into France and New Zealand's cases into Australia. Cyprus's numbers can be divided equally and assigned to Turkey and Greece.

Doesn't that make sense? Realistically having separate numbers for each European country is excessive. Anyone who cares what is happening in somewhere like, eg, Latvia can go look up the Latvian public health page.

Latvia is smaller than most Chinese provinces. It isn't a useful amount of data at the global scale. The UK is smaller than the major Chinese provinces.

It doesn't make any sense to give the UK as much paper space as India, for example. Taiwan, HK and Macau are not where the injustice is here. India is nearly 20% of all people.

Olympics is about world too.

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