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Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

China's numbers make no sense at all. A country with 1.4B people and they at one point had 80k people with the coronavirus in the country which includes many big cities, smaller cities, and towns. Somehow they only have 15 new cases in the whole country?

How does that make any sense if you take a moment to really think about it? It's clear they are either deliberately not testing or skewing/hiding their numbers for political purposes. It's a bit similar to India's numbers. India (population 1.3B) has fewer cases than Iceland (Isolated island of 300k people), again, how does this make any sense? It only makes sense if they're not testing people or hiding numbers.

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Why, concretely, doesn't that make sense? The CCP deliberately trying to hide things is definitely a possibility that should be considered, but I don't follow why you're saying it's impossible or what they'd hope to gain.

It's obvious what they gain? What does the CCP care about more than anything? They care about their image and the stability of their hold on the people.

If China looks like they "fucked it up" then the people become more restless and start questioning the party. Also, they care deeply about their worldwide reputation and that the world sees that their "system" (top down authoritarianism) is seen as more effective than western progressive liberal democracies.

It makes them look a hell of a lot better if they can say to their people, "Look guys, look at how well we handled this crisis compared to the Western countries, this is why having an authoritatian one-party state with absolute control is better for you guys!"

Looking like the idiot country who totally fucked this up doesn't help the CCP at all, which is why they tried to silence the guy who was originally trying to blow the whistle on this whole thing.

But if the virus isn't actually contained, how is lying about it going to help their image or stability? If Beijing hospitals end up stuffed to the brim with pneumonia patients, nobody's going to be fooled by a claim that there are no coronavirus cases.

No one is looking deeply or focusing on China right now. Due to their level of control they can easily hide the problem. But you're a fool if you think that in the last few days across the WHOLE of China that they had a handful of cases? Even with PERFECT lockdown of literally every person you would expect more than like 20 cases across 1.4B people.

They locked the fucking place down. No movement = no transmission.

But people not doing stuff basically means a recession, if not depression is guaranteed.

Seems like they did but my suppliers have been back to work for over two weeks now.

I'm not sure that locking the place down for a little while per se will cause a recession. Numbers will take a hit for a while because people are prevented from spending and working, but the normal course of action after a snow day or staying home with the flu is to get up and go back to work and resume spending money. This is the path China could be on for its economy overall, if not for its economic interdependence with the U.S., which is handling things differently.

The U.S. is steering itself toward a year-or-more-long issue that has people fearfully avoiding stores, deliveries, workplaces, and the consequences of this will ricochet. A recession happens when people and businesses restrict spending and hiring, and that's exactly what this scenario causes in a chronic way.

But who knows? Maybe Gilead's experimental antiviral will be approved within a month or two, and maybe that will be enough to make people not fearful and regain economic confidence.

A common definition of recession is a decline in GDP lasting for 2 consecutive quarters. It seems likely for this to cause a decline in GDP in Q1 and Q1 at a minimum, so a recession seems inevitable.

I do think there will be a point when going out becomes less of a concern and there will be a lot of pent up demand for travel. The recovery will likely be sharp (V-shaped).

I was speaking to the strategies that could be employed vs what we’re actually doing, and I am concerned that what we’re doing will cause a recession.

To relate the strategy to that formal definition of a recession, if everybody stayed home for a month this quarter, we might lose 1/3 of the quarter’s GDP. But if that break is structured so that it’s expected and we resume normal activity afterward, then in the next quarter we would see the GDP “grow“ a ton, if only back to normal because people are working and spending for the full three months, and we would cleanly avoid this formal definition for a recession.

Oh, I understand what you are saying now. I think the issue is that government officials aren't comfortable defining an endpoint right now. There are a lot of unknowns as to what could stop the spread at this point.

no vaccine will be approved at the earliest 6 months from now. By then the worst will be over. Most vaccines take 1+ years

No they didn't. This literally makes no sense. Do you understand how big China is? Do you understand how many people there are? Are you seriously telling me every person in China was "locked down"? How does that make any sense? Wuhan was "locked down" and one of my good friends who lives in Cali but whose parents are in Wuhan told me they live just outside the city and could leave their house easily and at will. So if they weren't locked down, are you telling me all the many hundreds of smaller cities and towns were "locked down" too??

Only someone who had never visited China and seen the scale of the place woukd say such a thing. It's like saying I locked down all the termite colonies in Australia.

Not really, read any news stories about it. Sure they were tough on people they quarantined, but people moved around.

Climate.

There was a theory that the virus doesn’t fare well in hot climates and that seems to be playing out.

A good example of this is Vietnam. Nearly all their cases have been in Hanoi which has quite temperate weather in the winter versus Ho Chi Minh City which is tropical all year around.

It’s not the only factor, but it does appear to have an impact.

Again. Maybe climate has an "impact" but the size of the numbers makes no sense. Greece isn't exactly a cold place right now, it's massively smaller than India and yet has 30% more coronavirus cases.

India: 1.3B population and right next to China. Greece 10M population and no close land links to China.

These numbers don't pass the common sense test.

Agreed that the impact of climate is a big question mark.

In terms of Greece, it's more like Japan or China than a tropical country.

Right next China is a weak argument. There is an impossibly terrain dividing India and China called Himalayas. Other means of transport are restricted from the very beginning.

It seems far too early to judge the degree to which warm weather mitigates this. There have been a growing number of cases in Australia and South America.

Also consider that in India, there is not only a massive population, but access to tests per capita is probably quite low. Furthermore, the background noise of other infectious diseases is higher there, so many of these cases may go unnoticed or just attributed to common ailments. Death by infectious disease, while tragic, is somewhat more normalized there, and it might be hard to convince a lot of people not to go about their daily lives.

India also has a young population.

That would reduce the death rate, note the infection rate.

How do they know the infection rate unless they are randomly sampling and I haven't read of any country doing anything close to that other than Korea, and it wasn't all the random.

Data from the China CDC shows the mortality rate (not the infection rate) is strongly correlated with age, especially above the age of 50.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099662/china-wuhan-coro...

People coming from overseas have to go through mandatory quanrantine in India. Air travel is restricted. A ship with Chinese travelers was halted near coastline as per WHO guidelines recently.

It would be very surprising if they quarantined in time or strictly enough to prevent the virus from entering in significant numbers. Even societies with highly centralized control structures (Iran, Japan) weren't able to keep it out. I doubt a decentralized country like India with huge amounts of human movement without and within could do it, just as the US and EU couldn't.

From 20+ of my friends in Wuhan, the numbers most likely correct. And in my city, a small city in China with about 3M population, there's about 100 total confirmed cases in the past 2 months, there's news spreaded in local social network for every case before official confirmation. IMO, it's very hard to hide numbers.

In early stage of Wuhan(Jan 2020), there's hiding numbers, and there's lots 'rumours' widely spreaded on social network, e.g. Lots messages from medical staffs in Wuhan, so we known the numbers of Wuhan is not correct. But in recent weeks there's no such 'rumours', the gov may have strong control on many things, but it's not possible to control all(most?) 'rumours'..

Without seeing the numbers for tests conducted you're just wildly speculating based on personal opinion about the country.

From WHO stats in the last day China has 50 new cases.

Let's take South Korea instead, they have tested more per capita than anywhere else on Earth by far and conduct over ten thousand a day. Since yesterday they've had 100 new cases.

Sorry to disappoint the doomsayers but all these big grandiose predictions seem far off the mark with a proper response.

Proper response is key.

It's exactly the argument that gets made here from time to time about doing maintenance and paying down tech debt.

The people that do it get called over-cautious and reactionary because shit never actually hits the fan.

India is a democracy with a free press; so the numbers are more trustable. India has low numbers because they are handling the crisis better. See: https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/03/05/kerala-earns-pr...

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