Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports
stdio.sangwhan.com
stdio.sangwhan.com
Our GitHub: https://github.com/reustle/covid19japan/
Hokkaido is about the size of South Carolina and approximate population of 6 million people. ~2.5M of which live in Sapporo. Most of the island is more rural with many tourist destinations. It's a popular destination for Chinese tourists in winter.
>Are the distant prefectures less likely to follow guidelines from Tokyo
Tokyo was seen as mostly following Hokkaido governor's lead early on. Hokkaido was the first to close schools, etc.
>and reporting more honestly?
Could HN dwellers stop implying Japan is handling this dishonestly? That is extremely rude coming from the nation whose CDC was angry to accept 14 infected citizens from the only ally nation that would accept their US Diamond Princess cruise ship and provide care for passengers.
They are. The incredible rate of test refusal here is keeping the numbers very low.
In Japan 6-7% of the tests come back positive. This is not at all indicative of too little testing.
Shouting fire in a crowded theater is not free speech. What you are doing here is not protected.
You've unfortunately been posting to HN quite a bit in the flamewar style. Would you please stop doing that? I realize that these topics are sensitive and hit sore spots all too easily. That's one reason the site guidelines include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." It isn't easy, but it's necessary that we all do it, because otherwise we just end up fighting with each other. Fighting each other feels urgent, but is not interesting, and the purpose of HN is to be an intellectually interesting place on the internet, if possible. This requires that we sort of resist the worst interpretations of each other's words, because they're so often vulnerable to misunderstanding.
By the way, in case you're not familiar with so-called Hanlon's Razor [1], it's not primarily about stupidity. It's really a way of saying that most human outcomes are not the result of malice. So in a way, that post was a (weak and unclear) defense of the Japanese institutions and reports that were being discussed above—a way of arguing that they weren't conscious bad action. The word 'stupidity' appears in that proverb partly out of ironic humor which is typical of the internet subculture that produced it, since it's ironic to defend someone against the charge of malice by making the charge of stupidity instead. It's not intended as the deep insult that the word 'stupidity' would imply in many cultural contexts. If you already know this, I apologize.
There is an additional level also. The word 'stupidity' in that proverb would not normally be a national or racial slur. It usually refers to the 'stupidity' of large institutions, which tend to produce inefficient or inadequate results even when the individuals who make up the institution are doing their best—or to the 'stupidity' of bureaucratic functionaries, who hacker-type people tend to feel superior to and smarter than. If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22556236, you'll see exactly the same argument applied to Spain's Covid-19 response. If anyone is being criticized as stupid in those comments, it's not peoples like the Spanish or the Japanese, it's mid-level government officials everywhere. Whether that's fair or not, we can leave as a separate question.
I’d be happy to donate scraping capacity to this project. If this is relevant ping me at omar@ domain from my profile.
The kicker is the most complex computer thing he ever did in his life was that Word presentation in university. HTML? Isn't that something you write by hand?
In a good number of very large (Fortune 100) companies, yes. Even in large tech companies.
Just as mechanical lathes and nail guns didn't put carpenters out of business, there are plenty of web sites that benefit from the attention of human hands, not just trusting the latest fad framework to concatenate several thousand dependencies pulled from random GitHub repositories.
Not to mention that mere exposure to inclement weather is enough to result in its onset, germ theory be damned
In the 'old days,' it would be a public number board or chalkboard, but it would be accurate. This is what a lot of ladies in the military or in operational centers would have done.
And definitely nothing wrong with hand-tweaked HTML. I wish sites were basic enough and HTML clear enough that it could be more pervasive.
You can dig up ledgers from 'old-timey' 100-year-old from little stores in the middle of nowhere that were handwritten and perfect. Perfect handwriting, perfectly updated, perfect math (i.e. adds up after corrections).
What matters is that the process is legit, that people are responsible for how the numbers are propagated, and they do it professionally.
It's almost weird to think that people expect that there is a 'robust and specific electronic process' for everything.
The level of organizational planning in WW2 was pretty shocking: all docs, notes, cue-cards, human process.
Everyone reading this needs to have a more wholesome historical education. The best example I can think of is read historical math puzzles, or geometry lessons from ancient greece. Organization of information is definitely culturally contingent, even here in the US.
The reports seem to reflect the opacity of communication of Japan's situation about the Covid-19. It's good that the author put out actionable suggestions at the end, but I'm wondering if the opacity is a result of internal issues or intended opacity. Makes me glad to see Canada's stats[1] being so clear in comparison.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/201...
Given that honesty in testing consistently precedes the eventual slowdown in deaths by several weeks, I strongly suspect that Japan is maliciously incompetent and a lot of dead Japanese will be the result.
When? Japan has had this coronavirus a lot longer than most places. If we expected the transmission rate to explode, we would have expected it to happen already, and we would be seeing the consequences.
https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-explainers/2020/3/2... shows that I am hardly alone in my suspicion that the numbers look good because reality is not being tracked.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-tokyo-olymp...
I certainly hope that the politicians in Parliament who asked questions got satisfactory answers. I doubt that they did, but there should be time to ask those same questions later when there is a clearer picture.
I just hope it isn't as bad as I fear it will be.
Typical causation versus correlation problem. Exponentially increasing pandemic outside Japan can also be the cause for everything: the olympics cancellation, the increasing govt concern and testing, and the sudden surge of cases within Japan from travelers.
No conspiracies needed.
Secondly for a couple of weeks now I've been running across articles of the form, "Japan should have had a problem by now, why are they an exception?" Which is more likely? That they were an exception until now, or that the Olympics provided extra motivation to stonewall?
It is clearly not proof. But extra motivation to fail to try to detect their own problem combined with reason to doubt their version of reality (in the same way that happened over and over again elsewhere) makes my estimate of the conditional probability very high that their government was simply a bit more deliberately blind than elsewhere.
And, as with everywhere else, the cost will be dead citizens. Only the further you let the problem go and the older your population, the worse it is. Japan has the highest concentration of truly old in the world. And may have let it go longer than anywhere else. The result? The final body toll won't be pretty.
I feel like we're watching Chernobyl play out in real time here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi is the Wikipedia article on it. It is hard to get statistics on it, but in 2006 close to 5% of all funerals in Japan were old people who died at home that nobody knew about for some time afterwards.
When all is said and done, Japanese will be discovering bodies for years afterwards. Not just because there is a crisis, but because that is simply how a lot of deaths happen in Japan.
Regarding the presentation of the data, I've seem enough poorly formatted presentations over the years to say that is unique to Japan.
My friends run a mid-sized hair salon, about 8 workstations, on the west side of Tokyo [edit: Kichijoji] and are still operating. They see no reason to close down, haven't been told to close down by anyone, and although their business is down, it's still brisk.
Meanwhile the shops are full of both people and stock (except for loo roll).
Some young people in Tokyo have been returning by shinkansen to their parents' homes in the countryside (which is obviously a dreadfully bad idea). I persuaded my friends not to do that, but they were thinking about it.
I agree though that until recently things were pretty open. Maybe they were open again today. I walked by a coffee shop and people were in it. The local Target like store was busy but main street in front of it was dead compared to normal.
I'm interested if you know more about this absurd-sounding Aso/wagyu beef tokens story? It's not reported at all in the western media.
This sounds strange enough for me to want to know more, and I tried looking it up, but only found weird porn when searching without quotes, and weird blockchain stuff from China when searching with quotes. Do you have any links I can run through a translator?
That's what really bugs me about those who love to point fingers at how this or that country is counting things wrong (often revealing their biases in the process).
Maybe every country has a random constant factor between actual cases and reported cases. But it doesn't matter - if it goes exponential, we'll know.
> Remember to not include death, because this is a quasi-hierarchy. The table tempts you to, but it's excluded. (The quasi-nature is because it is under the PCR tested positive umbrella on level 2.) So what about integrating level 3?
> That's simple. You don't. Because no matter how hard you try, the numbers won't add up. (e.g. Give it a try - you'll end up with 129 != 131 and 1147 != 1191. We'll need one of these numbers later.) Level 4 adds up though, so the plot thickens.
Note, however, that (131 - 129) + (1191 - 1147) = 46, i.e. the number of deaths.
So if you adjust the 131 and 1191 figures to match their subdivision, everything would sum up correctly, including the top level (pcr_tested_positive), which would then include deaths.
This would imply that 2 people without symptoms died, and 44 people with symptoms did.
Taking a guess, "deaths" used to be two separate columns: one under "with no symptoms" (2 deaths), and one under "with symptoms" (44 deaths). It was then decided that "deaths" should be its own top-level item, and someone decided that this was the best way to achieve that goal.
I can't find a way to make sense of the daily increases though, so this might be entirely wrong.
The rest looks indeed cooked, on purpose. Pasting images instead of tables is the usual trick.
How's corporate Japan as a whole doing with remote work?
Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having now leading to underreporting of numbers, back in Jan-Feb when every commenter on reddit and HN were saying China was covering it up.
Meanwhile people just assume Japan's numbers must be honest because... why? Anyone who has the slightest awareness of how Japan works knows that this is par for the course. And no, it's not just the government brainwashing the people. The people are complacent in this and defend their government by rejecting criticism and continuing to vote them in office.
Edit: Holy crispy, it's just an idea of mine, not an assertion or endorsement or confirmation. Geeze.
Unlike the USA?
Lie, that involves intent so I don't know that I care to indicate or debate that.
Highly skeptical, yeah I am considering they've already a long track record of suppressing information / people related to the COVID situation.
Less free countries have little reason / a long track record of hiding bad news, from their own people, others, etc, and they have less free media, people to discover / tell anyone otherwise.
>Meanwhile people just assume Japan's numbers must be honest because... why?
Here we are discussing an article that doesn't assume that.
Maybe because modern Japan doesn't have a track record of mass censorship and disappearing people who oppose governmental line?
Chinese gov is trying to blame US as source of the virus. I think Trump only dreams of being 'creative' on that level.
That said, I am not defending or justifying gov of Japan. This can be incompetence or malicious data tampering to look better.
I call it “crying wolf in reverse”: The problem with being a totalitarian state that falsely imprisons people on a regular basis is that you’ve lost all moral authority when it comes to arresting people for actual crimes. If you’ve falsified evidence, conducted show trials and made a mockery of rule of law before, why should anyone believe you when you say it’s a real crime this time?
We're seeing a similar situation with regards to their Covid-19 reporting. Is it necessarily inaccurate? No, but lying about everything else doesn't exactly lend us to trust you this time.
Unfortunately this doesn't mean what people might think it means. "Unlikely-to-be-convicted" doesn't mean much when the police have so many tools available to force confessions, whether the person is guilty or not.
*Not comparing to CCP
Justice systems are really hard to compare considering the different circumstances.
This in a system that still has a death penalty is quite unsettling.
Yeah, I see. So, was the victim from the Nabari wine case vindicated? How about the Ashikaga murder case? Or the imperial bank poisoning case?
Isn't that just normal "crying wolf"?
This is true, but what makes both the US and China (and many other countries at the moment) similar is they are controlled by governments with strong nationalist tendencies. Any state has the ability to control these stats by limiting the availability of testing. A nationalist-leaning state has an even stronger incentive to do so, because it leans even more heavily on the thesis that its nation is essentially different than others. This however, runs into the reality that this virus doesn't differentiate based on our cultural construct of nations.
Until a few days ago, you saw this most markedly in India, which just recently made a sudden U-turn in its denial of the problem.
In China's case, nationalism is coordinated with its totalitarianism, which as you point out makes it different. The Chinese response should be scrutinized for its initial failures as much as its later successes.
The saving grace in the US is that even though we have leadership incentivized by nationalist and self-preservatory urges to minimize the true magnitude of the problem, hospitals and state/local officials can publicly express that they are seeing a large number of likely cases that they can't test for, and publicly demand more testing and treatment capacity from federal authorities.
That is pretty much the dynamic that has been happening in the US for nearly a month - exemplified in the public war of words between state governors in initially affected states (CA, NY, MI, etc) and the Administration. And at this point, it's abundantly clear that the tide of truth is on the side of those state governors and public health officials. This is why military hospital ships are now showing up in Los Angeles and New York.
The US has a long history of spreading misinformation and lies too. Japan also tried to cover up its WW2 crimes.
Point is, all governments want to control information to a certain degree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
These “information control” done by the US and China are in no way comparable and any suggestion that they are is pure whataboutism. We are discussing this on a website based in the US, where freedom of speech is more-or-less guaranteed. Try doing the same in China and see how the CCP reacts.
For another example of this, consider that the American president often complains (rightly or wrongly, not commenting on its validity) that the media is against him, misinterprets his statements, etc.
Can you imagine such a situation in China? It is almost absurd to contemplate: an independent media that is overly harsh on Xi or the ruling party. Such a state of affairs should make it obvious that the intensity of censorship is a level of magnitude greater under the CCP.
The US lies differently than China. But the lies work all the same.
Claims the first case was in December. It was [middle of November](https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.htm...)
Other countries didn't even know there was much going on until December 30 thanks to Dr Li Wenliang [source](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...). He suddenly catches the disease and dies -- big coincidence in my opinion (especially as the death rate for someone 34 is 0.2%). This is at least SIX WEEKS after the initial infection.
They have hundreds to thousands of cases, but they somehow conclude that human to human transmission isn't occurring. Middle of January, WHO itself [tweets out](https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?ref_src=t...) that human to human transmission isn't happening. I'd note that Japan already had a case with NO links to any markets [source](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/16/national/scienc...)
Why would WHO do this? I don't know about the entire organization, but the WHO leader is [Tedros Adhanom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tedros_Adhanom). He is Ethiopian and works for the Ethiopian government. Ethiopia does 5.4 billion in trade with China let alone a 4 billion dollar direct investment [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Ethiopia_relatio...). China also holds almost half of Ethiopia's debt [source](https://www.cnn.com/style/article/addis-ababa-china-construc...). Put simple, the WHO leader is compromised when it comes to China. This extends further with weird dodging of questions about Taiwan by another WHO official [source](https://twitter.com/ezracheungtoto/status/124386977441046937...).
Despite all this, the US still started screening people on Jan 17 [CDC source](https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p0117-coronavirus-sc...). If the disease were more like MERS or the original SARS, this would have likely been all that was needed.
China throws a party with 40,000 people in Wuhan kicking an already huge problem into overdrive on January 18 [source](https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2020/02/06/wuhan-ne...)
On January 20 (exactly 10 weeks ago), China still denied the virus was transmitting between people [source](http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020012009077).
Only on January 21 does someone at WHO finally conclude human to human transmission is happening [source](https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...). Compromised WHO leader continues to praise China's response [source](https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...).
China allows hundreds of millions of people to travel over Chinese Lunar New Years (Jan 24-30). The idea that people from Wuhan hadn't already traveled elsewhere in the country is crazy given what we know about the 1-27 days before symptoms show.
Almost every article I've read that has mentioned Japan's low rate has raised the concern the numbers are faked. They highlight that it has a high rate of smoking, lots of travel to/from china, and very crowded cities. Each of these raises the risk. So I'd say reporters have been skeptical.
On the other hand, China is not just suspected of lying, but have been proven to have lied and suppressed the disease. In fact, that was the whole reason the disease got out of hand in the first place, as it's now clear the disease started spreading at least as early as December, and possibly even as early as October of last year. If China had properly not suppressed the information, the world might have been able to get a start on preparing vaccines and equipment and we could have avoided the current mess.
"every commenter on reddit and HN were saying China was covering it up"
Stop using absolutes. There are plenty of people in the US that realize the US numbers have been suppressed by a lack of testing. There are plenty of people in the US who actually think China has handled the situation better than our own dysfunctional government.
The only absolute truth is that we don't have all of the information yet.
In the case of Japan, they do not appear to have high enough transmission rates to cause serious problems. I don't know if they are lying about any given fact or figure. But they are not covering up a widespread COVID-19 outbreak because we know what that type of outbreak looks like. It looks like Italy.
Well, this jibes with reality.
I could care less about actual case counts - few countries are close to having the capacity to test everyone so who cares.
What is a huge problem with China is the death statistics. Looking at Lombardy with 6k+ deaths with the outbreak not yet peaked, am I really supposed to believe that only 2.5k died in Wuhan (similar population)? The CFR outside Hubei is ridiculously low - only 1 death out of 1200 cases in Zhejiang (!)?
During China's outbreak, there were additionally lots of accusations of case data being completely made up (insufficient variance in daily numbers) and looking at basically every other country's quite noisy reports today, that was almost certainly true.
The implications are pretty vast: China's reporting actually made the disease seem less urgent than it really was. Perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved had they been more transparent.
When you do widespread testing as China did in Zhejiang you can find a lot of mild cases. Indeed, Iceland, which did the same, has 1020 cases and 2 deaths.
NYT had a fascinating story on an effort in the US to scale up production of ventilators, that produced nothing in 14 years
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
Wuhan's medical system was in complete crisis between lockdown and when the first field hospital opened 1.5w after: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047613/chin.... There's reports of entire families dying at home (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/18/coronavirus-ki...) -- I am quite doubtful Lombardy has been hit harder than Wuhan.
I will admit I'm wrong if China runs serological tests on Wuhan to determine the percent that were infected. I'll be extremely surprised if they do because the data will prove the point above (my guess? it would show 1M+ were infected, meaning only 2500 deaths was impossible).
Death being concentrated in one region is not an exclusive phenomenon in China. If you look at Korea's stats you'll realize there many provinces with zero deaths[1]:
Incheon: 58 cases, 0 death Seoul: 426 cases, 0 death Gyeongnam 95 cases, 0 death Ulsan: 45 cases, 0 death Chungbok: 44 cases, 0 death Sejong 46 cases, 0 death Deajeon: 45 cases, 0 death Chungnam: 127 cases, 0 death Jeonbuk: 13 cases, 0 death Gwangju: 20 cases, 0 death Jeonam: 9 cases, 0 death Jeju: 9 cases, 0 death Airports: 202 cases, 0 death
Deaths are only concentrated in 5 regions:
Daegu: 6624 cases, 111 deaths Gyeongbuk: 1298 cases, 38 deaths Gyeonggi: 463 cases, 5 deaths, Busan: 118 cases, 3 deaths Gangwon: 36 cases, 1 death
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...
Two significant notes, however:
* China reports that its outbreak has largely resolved. The vast majority of the 1,000 cases in Iceland are still active, so we don't know how many deaths Iceland will eventually have. South Korea's current fatality rate still seems to be around 1%, with many cases yet to resolve.
* China seems to include only symptomatic cases in its total. That should bias its fatality rate upwards, since the denominator does not include any asymptomatic people who resolved without developing a full case of COVID-19. (Note that this will also be true for jurisdictions that require symptoms for testing. I believe that SK tested many asymptomatic people, but the US for example is not.)
Note that the 1%CFR estimates are based on full access to medical resources. When medical systems are overwhelmed as in Italy, we expect that number to increase from that baseline. Jurisdictions that report a markedly lower fatality rate are likely to have had systematic problems in identifying or reporting on case totals.
2820 positive cases.
Positive rate: 0.8%
Iceland: 3,787 tests by March 18,
330 positive cases.
Positive rate: 8.7%
Clearly Guangdong did more testing with respect to its epidemic than Iceland.
Let's look at New York State:
172,360 tests by March 29,
59513 positive cases
Positive rate: 34.5%
Hubei population is 60M. So they'd have to do 2.7 Million tests to have the same degree of testing at Iceland.
Even with an excessive lockdown, it seems that just on this issue alone, China's numbers look really quite wrong.
That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and almost no deaths look very suspicious.
Combined with the fact that all public Chinese information is part of an 'orchestration of public opinion' (i.e. propaganda effort) and is not based in any reality, so of course, there's a credibility problem to begin with.
So you are saying that countries and regions that are under-testing relative to Iceland all have numbers that are wrong?
"That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and almost no deaths look very suspicious."
That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country outside of Hubei. The number of cases never exceeded 3,000 in any other province.
No, I'm saying that Iceland's numbers are strong, that they compare remotely well with most other nations (ie more testing, lower rate of infection), all of which, when taking together, make China's numbers look fabricated.
"That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country outside of Hubei."
3000 is an enormous number of cases, tantamount to a 'major outbreak'.
You want "jibes" here. Jive means to talk nonsense:
But apparently the use of the word "jive" to mean "talking nonsense" is the older, original usage, and the type of music/dance is named after the term, rather than the other way around. TIL.
The earlier musical dance/reference is the really just the Johnny Otis song which is actually just a Bo Diddley rip-off:
Of course, it's probably more literally true that they could care less, after all, they care enough to post about it on the internet. They probably don't do that for... um... articles about the 1984 Honda Accord after all?
Oh English.
Your explanation is a retcon.
Of course, if enough people start saying "I could care less" I guess they get to decide what it means. Living languages are literally awesome.
"I could care less" can mean "I could (stand to) care less".
As in, "The amount I could care about this is zero because it's so irrelevant, but in responding to this discussion or otherwise engaging the topic, I have exhibited a bit of care, albeit undue."
For fun, I sometimes like to propose this to anyone who brings it up, but I could care less whether people say "could" or "couldn't". :)
Edit: Hah! neltnerb gets me :)
Generally however, I think there's some assumption or perhaps prior demonstration that implies a lack of care to start.
It's tough to describe. "I could care less what you do with your money" may come with a long understood history that not much care was given to this topic the past (i.e. we haven't discussed it before), and if we are now arguing about it because because some prior discussion escalated, I am indicating that I preferred the status quo with that statement (albeit in a way that probably doesn't defuse tensions in this particular example :).
If, on the other hand, you treat it as a nonsensical synonym for "I don't care", then the phrase would well have been "gooble gooble goo" and it would make no difference, since everyone knows what you mean when you say it.
I find arguing its correctness moot because there's no way to spin the sentence to be correct. At most, you can say "well, you got the point", and that's the end of it, at least when you're dealing with a descriptivist (which you aren't, in this case).
That rephrasing hypothesis is the best I've seen yet, but still not especially persuasive.
The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate. Case fatality rates go from less than 1% to more than 10%. In France, on the official website where they give the numbers, it is clearly written "we don't test everyone, the actual number of cases is higher", and deaths are "of COVID-19 patients dying in hospitals". All numbers are made up, because there is no way to know the actual numbers.
And don't tell me that anything after January was China's fault. It is not like governments around the world didn't know what happened there. Maybe the general public wasn't well informed but it is trivial for a government to be aware of an event of such scale. No, China may be to blame for the initial cases, but for the pandemic phase, it is completely our fault.
> And don't tell me that anything after January was China's fault. It is not like governments around the world didn't know what happened there.
Both are possible, and both are very likely. China suppressed information to save face, and many other countries were incompetent in responding to the information they did have access to.
This is exactly the point of parent comment: people are simply repeating the same narrative based on "the history" as if we are still in cold war and it is impossible to know what really happened in China, while this is no longer true.
Surely the situation is not ideal, in that you still need hours to read between lines and investigate, China must improve on this, but the virus just showed us one thing: being dismissive about anything coming out of China may lead to a global disaster. We should either try to understand, or cut ties with China.
The fact is, China has always been on don't trust and verify relationship. You don't listen to what they say, but watch what they do. And China is one of the most watched country by foreign analysis and intelligence officials everywhere. If shutting down a city and then the country is less of an urgent indicator than their numbers collated together during an uncharted event, then you're focusing on the wrong thing. This is well understood by people in China policy who cultivate relationships with Chinese counterparts as part of intelligence gathering... intelligence that countries failed to act on. For example the Chinese CDC was basically modeled after and trained by the US CDC. There are many unofficial channels between Chinese and HK/Taiwan/US medical communities which is one reason why HK and Taiwan was so ahead of the curve. There's also thousands of expats in China and millions of Chinese diaspora with connections to the mainland. There's no shortage of information on a massively public crisis like this, there are only people who don't know how to look, or looked and decided to ignore what they found. And more disconcertingly, on a diplomatic level between western countries - the possibility that information isn't being shared behind the usual channels because lack of US leadership in the last few years has undermined world order.
Try to understand, precisely, what?
covid
> what is happening
covid
> what does all these mean
No idea, what does all these mean?
> instead of being dismissive
I didn't dismiss, I asked. Answer the question.
> claiming they are lies and propaganda
No, you just said that. I asked a question. Answer the question please, to wit, What am I being asked to understand.
China suppressed covid information because that's it's nature; deny until it can't just deny any more. Now exactly the same, downvotes against something because you just can't answer it- what's Chinese for "the leopard can't change it's spots"?
It's a very simple cause-and-effect.
a) Fox News
b) China
But as you ignored the last question (Answer: China is a big country, not Fox News), here's a new one for you. Which Chinese guy named Li Wenliang tried to warn people the shit was hitting the fan and then got seriously slapped down for it because reality wasn't what president Xi wanted to hear? And then died of exactly what he was trying to warn about?
As my Chinses is poor may I ask a favour of you, that you translate this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/%E6%9D%8... for us, please.
Thank you.
I understand what you are talking about, but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January. And there was that report from secret service that was known by goverment and became public later. The situation being bad in China was not opaque or unknown. They dis not actually managed to make it much of secret.
And right now, "Chinese are lying" is used as propaganda to make Americans think that situation is quite good and defensive measures are unnecessary. It just can't possibly be that America has taken lead in infected. America ia the greatest always and in everything. It just can't be, it would be just fine to open economy and it is all hoax.
Anyway
> American doctor was fired for talking about lack of materials for doctors and nurses
Link please. Then we'll see if it's so, and if so, if there's any comparison.
> but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January
Indeed there was. I used that info to prepare BTW. And it only got out because the CCP could not suppress it totally. So "the CCP failed to suppress..." is not the same as "the CCP published...". Indeed, you said it better than I did: "They di[d] not actually managed to make it much of secret"
Wenliang had more balls and brains than the entire CCP put together. I salute the gent.
> And right now, "Chinese are lying"
Not The Chinese. Not Wenliang and those like him. The CCP and their mouthpieces.
> It just can't possibly be that America has taken lead in infected
The US fucked up monumentally and will pay the price. That much the US recognises, and all of it will do in just a very few weeks.
BTW could you translate that letter for us?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/business/media/china-expe...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/washington-sla...
Of course we play it off as being "fair" and setting quotas.
There's a huge difference between accuracy and unadulterated deception. If the numbers are off by 10%, you can claim it's inaccurate, but if the numbers are off by a lot more, it starts moving into deception territory. Right now, assuming the stories about urns being delivered to funeral homes are accurate, it sounds like numbers might be off my 2x or more. That's deception.
On the other hand, the number of urns being delivered to funeral homes can be easily explained. For example, the urns story talks about a fact, the amount of empty urns being delivered to funeral homes exceeds death count. But selling urns is marketized and people could pick their preferred combination of style, size and price, so this can be well explained. The story then goes ahead and matches this fact-based but pointless number with "random users on social media claims 3500 urns will be delivery daily during next two weeks". I mean, that's smelly.
Sure they were.
The lack of response from the US is in no way due to China's reporting, it's due to the US propaganda and incompetence.
> Wuhan residents are increasingly skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s reported coronavirus death count of approximately 2,500 deaths in the city to date, with most people believing the actual numbers is at least 40,000
https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-covid-19-death-toll-may-tens-...
> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival. By that estimate, 42,000 urns would be given out in the 12-day period.
Just a few sources, you can find many others if you look though.
> Trucks dropped off roughly 2,500 urns on Wednesday and again on Thursday local time to one of the eight local funeral homes, a driver told Chinese media outlet Caixin. The news site also published another photo showing 3,500 urns stacked inside the facility. The number of urns that arrived in that one funeral home was far greater than the city's official overall death COVID-19 toll.
Note that the numbers given are for EMPTY urns.
> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival.
Note that this is based on "some random Wuhan residents playing numbers on social network".
Yeah, when the government hides information and imprisons journalists, that's all we're left with, isn't it?
They're not the same source, by the way. They're multiple different community sources reporting the same information.
Human-human transmission is one of the fundamental elements used to determine the urgency of an outbreak.
Taiwan says WHO failed to act on coronavirus transmission warning: relationship with Beijing blamed for not sharing alert over human-to-human infection
without paywall: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-03-24/taiwan...
"We asked them whether there's a possibility of human-to-human transmission. We indeed asked them and reminded them of the matter," Chou said. He said the WHO confirmed it had received the letter but did not respond to it.
Kudos to Taiwan for reminding WHO an unknown virus, just like any other virus, may possibly be H2H-transmissible!
Dec 30: The Wuhan Municipal Health Committee reported to the WHO that 27 people had been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown cause.
Dec 31: China contacts the WHO and informs them of "cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan".
Jan 4: The WHO waited for China to release information about the "mysterious new pneumonia virus".[51] The United Nations agency activated its incident-management system at the country, regional and global level and was standing ready to launch a broader response if it was needed.
Jan 9: The WHO confirmed that the novel coronavirus had been isolated from one person who had been hospitalised. The WHO also reported that Chinese authorities had acted swiftly, identifying the novel coronavirus within weeks of the onset of the outbreak, with the total number of positively tested people being 41. The first death from the virus occurred in a 61-year-old man who was a regular customer at the market.
Jan 14: Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO's emerging diseases unit said that there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus, mainly small clusters in families, adding that "it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission"
Jan 20: After two medical staff were infected in Guangdong, China announced that the virus was human-to-human transmissible … the WHO has said [it] is deeply concerning and could signal evidence of a much larger outbreak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
China probably could have informed people earlier, but it seems easier to not tell the WHO than to pressure the WHO to keep a secret. Also, there's a difference between possible human-to-human and confirmed human-to-human transmission.
Indeed, the total positive test count tells you more about changes in your testing capacity and testing criteria than it tells you about the infected population. I suppose it’s helpful in establishing the lower bound, but with no error bars on the possible upper bound.
Testing a statistically valid random sample of the population would be neither difficult or expensive. Running these tests every few days across every major metropolitan areas would be extremely useful data to report the current active infection rates.
This is useful even without an antibody test, but of course much more useful with an antibody test, because then you know not just active infection percentages but total infected percentages.
I can’t begin to speculate why this data is either not being collected or not being made available.
Death rate is somewhat useful but very lagging and also limited by not knowing the true IFR.
The only other proxy we have for guessing the total infection rate in a population is the percentage of positive tests. In NY there are districts which have 50% of tests coming back positive, which is so high as to be almost unbelievable. If that data is correct and at all indicative of the general population, it is, counter-intuitively, extremely good news.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
There are many entities, specifically in the world of finance that perform their own measurements of Chinese economic numbers and they don't jibe with the official figures.
With respect to Coronavirus, China lied and suppressed information early on, including sanctioning and suppressing anyone who talked about it.
As far as Japan, why assume others are not suspicious?
Japan's numbers look 'off' there's been a lot of talk about that.
American numbers are transparent, created by different agencies, the issues are likely testing, the varying types of tests.
Edit: I would say that most nations are otherwise the same, the only reason Japan stands out in this round is because their numbers just look odd.
Edit: This is not a new phenomenon. During the Soviet era, we saw the same thing happening from the USSR et. al. Public numbers are politicized and an essential part of the propaganda effort. It's not even a controversial position. Consider that even right now, during the Huawei political crisis, nobody can discern who actually controls this major international conglomerate, as officially they are ostensibly 99% owned by employees, which is an obvious fallacy.
At this point all I can believe are South Korea's numbers. They have transparent government unlike China, they have tested extensively unlike the US, Italy and Spain, and their climate is similar to the US unlike Taiwan and SE Asian countries.
Do you mean political climate? I don’t think the weather over regions that large can be generalised in any meaningful way.
China = totalitarian = bad. Any good results are either by luck or a lie.
USA = democracy = good. Any bad results are due to incompetence or Trump/Hillary (depending on your leanings).
Plenty of people exist in the gray area, but they're not going to be upvoted. Any post in support of China is going to be marked as "bot" or "CCP shill".
Japan gets lumped in with the US. The case I find funniest is South Korea. Everybody agrees SK has done an amazing job while maintaining a very free society and vibrant democracy. The room tends to go quiet when you mention that this was enabled by their mass surveillance network. (Check out the live streams of their traffic cams! [1]).
[1] https://map.naver.com/v5/?c=14135232.1111786,4519333.3257182...
Citation needed.
Live traffic feeds are common here in the US[1] and other countries.
[1] https://transportation.arlingtonva.us/live-traffic-cameras/
Citation needed."
Are you kidding?
China's mass surveillance and censorship network is pervasive, all-encompassing, widely publicized, and an intrinsic aspect of their state apparatus.
It's not even remotely comparable to 'license plate monitoring' in scale, scope, politicization, repercussions.
This level of relativistic rhetoric is anti-intellectual.
At least that is how I read it.
I fail to see how live traffic feeds is evidence of their mass surveillance network. The US also has these. NYC and the DoT even broadcast the feeds it on a cable TV channel:
https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/motorist/atis.shtml
https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/watching-city-...
If true, and the Chinese government officially pronounced that it does in fact always lie, the entire country would dissapear in a vortex of paradox.
I'm wondering if self-isolation along with a culture of face masks is why their numbers are so low. A single person wearing a cotton face mask wont move the numbers down at all but a majority of the population both retarding their exhalation of virulent loads and their inhalation of virulent loads will. Should also be emphasized that the philosophy behind face masks isnt "dont you make me sick" its "i really dont want to make you sick"
Do you have any information to back that up?
I have seen respected epidemiologists saying hands are a minor vector, that Covid19 is a respiratory disease with respiration being the dominant transmission vector.
FWIW, Every report I read was skeptical of Japan's numbers, usually based in thinking they had an ulterior motive to downplay the outbreak because they didn't want to move the Olympics.
You are talking about the regime that fired the previous official in charge of the chinese government's response to it's covid19 outbreak for aledgedly falsifying information, and afterwards inexplicably decided to officially leave out from their covid19 infection statistics any patient who was confirmed to carry the virus but subjectively wasn't experiencing major symptoms.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government's officials claim with a straight face that there are no new covid19 cases in China, and ridiculously stating that any new case happens to be foreigners importing an infection caught outside of China.
The reason why people think the Chinese governmemt is lying is because the Chinese government is patently and shamelesly lying.
I could provide citations and sources and support for everything I pointed out.
But I noticed you are posting using an account created recently which is being used to brigade threads all over HN that point out anything less than totally positive involving China's ruling regime.
I'm Chinese, I realize Chinese government's flaws, but I also recognize its merits. I hope you can accept that people with different opinions than you are not just trolls
The phenomenon you're describing is called a reputation.
Japan is notorious for faking numbers to save face like their murder rate [0] but americans never seem to doubt them. Very odd.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-09-fg-autop...
Like, how long can they lie? a week? a month? Eventually they're going to get caught, no?
In fact, you should do the opposite: add flame retardant, i.e. use neutral language, narrow the scope of your claims to what the substance supports, edit out grand provocation.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
For e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703219
Commenter labels a legitimate company as "skeezy", uses needlessly insulting language to polarize discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703881
Commenter uses the usual government trope to polarize discussion.
Dang, question: how is this nationalistic? It seems to me the opposite - it's pointing out the media, Reddit, and this site's blatant (IMO sinophobic) double standard.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Adding snark and flamey rhetoric to generalizations about nations (and group views of nations) is guaranteed to evoke worse from others and put a thread into a downward spiral. The GP spawned 140+ comments, almost 80% of the entire page, and the discussion is between poor and terrible. It's full of mechanical repetition of the same angry things people say everywhere the same trigger comes up ("China is a totalitarian state", "China lied about literally EVERYTHING"). Indignation plus repetition is the worst combo for HN. Meanwhile the other 20% of the discussion on this article is actually not bad. That is the difference between provoking a flamewar vs. not. It's not cool, and the root comment is most responsible for it.
In case it helps, I've spent many hours telling HN users that they can't post inflammatory rhetoric about or against China or Chinese people.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
When speaking of the actions of corporations, governments, or groups of people working in tandem in any fashion, malice needs to be your first assumption.
Stupidity can be dealt with after you fix the problem, but malice will not only make the problem worse, but will also make dealing with the problem more difficult.
It's not okay to call Chinese stupid.
??
This is a challenge for moderation, but the approach we take has been stable for a long time. I've written about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844, and there's lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for anyone who wants it.
Concerns about HN getting more/too political go back almost as far as the site itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. There's no systemic breach, just topical fluctuation.
How we handle major ongoing stories (like this crisis) is mostly by downweighting routine follow-ups, so that just the stories with significant new information get primary coverage: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That's the intention, at least.
Of course there are always exceptions for submissions that have intellectually curious angles, like the detective aspect in the OP here.