Mystery in Wuhan: recovered coronavirus patients test negative then positive

I think that's missing the point, which is that the only way to get the necessary accuracy is to use multiple independent sources of information. It's not whether clinicians are better than tests or vice versa, but that no single datum is good enough.

> This also why I believe human doctors are still unbeatable by AI.

Because you hypothesize that they can rapidly learn new, not very distinctive patterns without much data?

I remember an article early in the outbreak that Chinese doctors found the most reliable diagnosis comes from CT scans. Test was merely the first filter. They tuned the settings to increase scan speed at the cost of resolution and setup a process to scan up to 200 patients a day per scanner. I wonder if this is still best practice that other countries aren't adopting. On the other hand I expect tests to have improved since the early days. There's also the consideration China simply had more CT scanners that could be mobilized to Wuhan which makes this less practical elsewhere.

Agreed the worst test would be 50% accurate

I suspect it's because this virus is optimized to enter cells that line the lungs/respiratory tract, then also sheds back that same way. Meanwhile, cells in, and along, the bloodstream aren't infected – and are most-trafficked by the body's immune response, including virus-destroying antibodies.

(Why are rodents more prevalent in the walls/crawlspaces of a dwelling, rather than the hallways?)

Because it’s a respiratory disease

If you're looking for a chemical explaination, I don't know, but the virus can work it's way around quite fine using the lymphatic system, so there's no "fitness" reason that would make it need to hang out in the blood.

not really. it's just an admission that sampling frequency matters.

It depends on the time of the illness. Roughly my understanding is: 1st week - high virus load in the nasopharyngeal area. 2nd - almost no virus load in the nasopharyngeal area, high virus load in the lungs

They looked at the numbers, said "Ah, fuck it, this ain't that bad." and resumed production? It's not like the factories are full of 70+ year-old workers.

> how do you refute the point that export numbers are hard to fake?

By the fact that there are already reports of factories throughout the world that kept operating eventhough they were experiencing an outbreak of covid19 within their staff.

And let's be honest: no one places China in the top spots in rankings on safe working conditions and human rights.

It's kind of how alarming raising Sinophobia and Chinese skepticism since the tradewar has made people unable to process reality when it comes to China. Millions of accessible posts on Chinese social media showing the conditions of lockdown from Wuhan to other cities. Thousands of expats stuck in China confirming the ground truth. Media reposted on twitter and youtube etc. But everything either gets downvoted out of view or dismissed as propaganda to the detriment of their own response. If everyone saw the measures being taken in China to contain COVID, then maybe they wouldn't have reacted so poorly.

Side note, they absolutely manipulate their financial numbers. "No one believes China's numbers," my financial broker uncle in Hong Kong once said.

No one really cared that much because manipulation, risk, and uncertainty is baked into financial equations no matter what the country or government. Now that we're talking about lives, it's harder to dismiss.

>mentioned once

I don't see it frequently in writing, but the majority of TV and podcast reporting from news sites has the disclaimer. And there's enough China bad articles out there that I feel like this is implicitly assumed.

Either way, no one trusts Chinese stats, including the Chinese public themselves, and the Chinese government most of all. The ability to collect accurate statistics when there's so many different development levels country-wide simply isn't there. For example, China doesn't use GDP internally, they use LKI, LiKeQiang Index which aggregates a value from measurable indicators like freight cargo volume, electric consumption, bank loans. There's also TSF, Total Social Financing. They can still be gamed, but physically (running empty trains), but much harder to fake via submitting fake excel sheets to central government. Chinese GDP is basically a back of the napkin estimate to appease foreign investors, it's also used to set growth targets instead of reflecting it. Most of the mainstream western reporting on Chinese GDP does not understand this. It's well understood among China watchers. The most comprehensive study on Chinese GDP so far, by CSIS, suggested China was under reporting their GDP.

As for stacked urns in Wuhan, the city is still under quarantine so urns would not be picked up. Also necessary to account for other sources of death. The article quotes 56K cremations in Q4 2019, so a few thousands urns especially as restock doesn't seem atypical. Like LKI, it's an useful oblique indicator, but should be considered in other context. If there's mass death, enough to measurably affect hysterical people in quarantine, it would be on Chinese social media which would leak to China watchers. There's many expats and Chinese people with VPNs, things that affect the public on a mass scale inevitably leaps over the firewall, it's not opaque like politburo politics. People need to stop looking at Chinese numbers and instead extrapolate from oblique indicators. When expats in China talk about things returning to normal, when Chinese diaspora aren't mourning about sick or dead family members en-mass, then you can assume that reflects ground reality.

Not in the context presented, no. The article isn't talking about their "initial actions", it's talking about their international assistance work. China is absolutely a global leader in providing humanitarian assistance to other nations struct by COVID-19. In fact they're pretty much the only nation doing anything like this, at all.

And historically, that was always one of the core roles played by America. So in perspective it's sort of notable, no?