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Comment by phoenixstrike | Hacker News Reader

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers.

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.

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Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. There's substantive material to discuss here, but you've unfortunately poured firestarter over it (e.g. snark and flamey rhetoric). When people do this, the results are predictable and dismal—especially when the material is flammable to begin with. That's why the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to post this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

Unfortunately for you, people have been using neutral language to start daily flame-wars and getting away with it.

It's easy to make grand claims like that. Where are the links? It's not ok for anyone to start flamewars on HN, and lord knows I spend enough of my life telling people so.

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.

Oh, I meant it half in jest. I definitely don't want your job ;)

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.

Ah ok! Actually I mostly agree with you about those comments. They lead to predictably worse discussion. However, they're in a different category than the more egregious kind that we post moderation responses to.

> Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar.

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.

The issue is the expected value of the subthread. Is it predictable that a comment would blow up into a flamewar? If so, then it was flamebait. In this case the flamebait was nationalistic because the topic was in the 'nations' bucket.

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...

> Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence.

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.

These claims have no basis in facts. The case fatality rate varies greatly depends on whether the health capacity is being overwhelmed, because when you don't have enough ICU beds or ventilators, your seriously ill patients cannot live. Lombardy experienced a greater strain on its medical system than Wuhan ever did. China sent 40,000 medical professionals from the rest of the country to Wuhan where has Lombardy had little outside aid. China also had universal masking whereas Italy never did. The real case count in Italy is in the 7 figures.

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.

That's interesting. I had not heard that but that raises the question of where did those 40,000 medical professionals practice medicine? Where did China get all their ventilators and PPEs? Did they need them? Once this is all over I hope all the countries get together and compare notes and experiences so we're all better prepared for the next pandemic.

In most of the world, the lack of preparation seems to be more for structural and political reasons than due to lack of knowledge.

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...

Do you believe Zhejiang was as widely tested as Iceland? Their fatality rates are lower than the widely tested Iceland (or literally anywhere in the world), which still has a pandemic ongoing. In fact none of the province numbers are believable (https://bnonews.com/index.php/2019/12/tracking-coronavirus-c...), with only Beijing and Henan barely in the "unlikely but possible" category.

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).

The low rate of deaths in the rest of China shows that the lockdown of Wuhan works. The rest of China never had that many cases.

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...

> 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.

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.

Guangdong China: 320,000 tests by Feb 28,

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%

Iceland as of March 30 has done 16K tests. Which is 45K/million people (4.5% of their entire pop), they have 6.6% infection rate. [1]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing

"Even with an excessive lockdown, it seems that just on this issue alone, China's numbers look really quite wrong."

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.

"are saying that countries and regions that are under-testing relative to Iceland all have numbers that are wrong?"

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'.

>"Well, this jives with reality."

You want "jibes" here. Jive means to talk nonsense:

https://www.grammarbook.com/homonyms/jibe-jive.asp

thanks for the tip; will edit

Huh. I figured that "jive" was a musical term first-and-foremost, and therefore to say "jiving with" was a bit like saying "grooving with" or more generally "in sync with."

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.

No I think its the other way around. "Jive" was still in use up until the late 70s - The Bee Gees hit "Jive Talkin'" and a well-known scene form the comedy movie "Airplane" both being examples. It is/was almost always used in connection with speaking i.e "don't jive talk me"

The earlier musical dance/reference is the really just the Johnny Otis song which is actually just a Bo Diddley rip-off:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxU995zbfno

Plus, "couldn't care less", though I'm fighting a losing fight.

Maybe they could care less? Yes, it's a losing fight.

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.

Think of "I could go out less", "I could eat less", "I could spend less", etc. All these phrases clearly imply that you're overdoing it now and need to stop. "I could care less", as used, means the opposite, that they don't care almost at all.

Your explanation is a retcon.

... that was the joke. But I agree jokes are better when they're explained (not kidding).

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.

Sorry, I have to.

"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 :)

"I could care less" could mean anything other than "I don't care completely", including "I care passionately about this, it is the thing I care most about", thus making it meaningless. If I said "I could work less", would you assume I meant "I work almost zero hours"?

If on the other hand you said "I could work less," I would assume that (note the italics).

True there's ambiguity there and the sentence alone really only conveys that the topic isn't one that the stater wants to focus on any further at the moment.

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 :).

There are two ways to look at this: What the words actually communicate, and what you know them to mean. If you told an alien "I could care less", they would have very little information as to your state of caring. Therefore, the phrase fails in that respect.

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).

Here's a good thread on the issue, with Google Ngram evidence for the original phrase (we know which one that is ;), and another post with a hypothesis, echoed in a couple of subsequent posts, for the emergence of the rephrasing: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283149/when-did-...

That rephrasing hypothesis is the best I've seen yet, but still not especially persuasive.

"Oh stewardess... I speak Jive" https://youtu.be/g0j2dVuhr6s?t=58

Jus' hang loose, blood. She gonna catch ya up on da rebound on da med side.

Honestly does anyone believe China’s death statistics? I think the west believes than more than even those living under communist rule in China, and that says a lot.

China locked down Wuhan much earlier than Italy did. And they did it harder. Totalitarian states have an advantage in situations like that.

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.

China has a long, long history of suppressing access to information though. Not just in reporting false data, but also in limiting the press from investigating issues themselves. Are you honestly saying that Japan and the US have a comparable history?

> 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.

> Are you honestly saying that Japan and the US have a comparable history?

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.

Trump has elevated Chinese issues into familiar grievance politics that many people are unable to assess the situation impartially. I've seen so many posts on western social media of conditions in quarantined Chinese cities being suppressed or dismissed as propaganda/shill that people are failing to accept reality, deluding themselves into unpreparedness. Also many are simply ignorant of Chinese-western relationship dynamics to comment usefully.

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.

> We should either try to understand

Try to understand, precisely, what?

Try to understand what happened in China, what is happening and what does all these mean, instead of being dismissive on anything coming out of China, claiming they are lies and propaganda.

> what happened in China

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.

Aww, look at that. You can't answer the question so surprise! the downvotes.

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 is impossible to trust information that comes out of country that suppresses freedom of the press.

It's a very simple cause-and-effect.

It is not like western channels were truthful all the time. Keeping America, compare fox news information with msnbc. No way both are telling truth about cornavirus.

Answer this without getting terribly confused, which of the following is a large country, which one is not a country:

a) Fox News

b) China

You would be surprised, but fox news is what is coming out of America. And currently American president is taking facts from there and disseminated them in press conferences.

And half the population dislike Trump. And they can criticise him freely. And do.

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.

American doctor was fired for talking about lack of materials for doctors and nurses.

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.

Well, as you seem to struggle with that one too, the clue's in the question - the guy's name was Li Wenliang!

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?

A source on recent press expulsions in China.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/business/media/china-expe...

And the US expelled chinese journalists as well

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/washington-sla...

Of course we play it off as being "fair" and setting quotas.

> The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate.

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.

Maybe. But it is really hard to find an explanation on why every medical statistics (severe rate, hospitalization rate, death rate, average time in hospital, average recovery time, etc) seems to hold true and verified by other countries, and they can still fake their death count (and only death count).

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.

> seems to hold true and verified by other countries

Sure they were.

Mind giving an example of what doesn't match?

China's reporting in no way made it seem less urgent. The reported fatality rate hasn't significantly changed from their reports.

They're reporting 2.5k deaths in Wuhan, while most estimates and other sources put it closer to 20k+. A factor of 10 isn't much of a change?

I don't deal in speculation and rumours sorry. The 2-3% assuming you have medical treatment has held true. The 10+% hospitalization has held true.

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.

Everything I've seen matches up with the Chinese data (when adjusting for test coverage for mild symptom patients). Where are you seeing this 10x higher number?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wuhan-residents-dismiss-...

> 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.

The two links seems to point to the same source, and:

> 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.

Note that this is based on "some random Wuhan residents playing numbers on social network".

> 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.

In December, China's influence caused the WHO -not- to report human to human transmission. This was despite the known infection of healthcare workers, and counter to the reports made from Taiwan.

Human-human transmission is one of the fundamental elements used to determine the urgency of an outbreak.

Hello, would you please link us to the report made from Taiwan which reports H2H transmission in Dec 2019? My Google-fu failed me on this, thanks!

https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...

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.

Thanks for the non paywall-d link, that's an interesting read, also previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22712971

Kudos to Taiwan for reminding WHO an unknown virus, just like any other virus, may possibly be H2H-transmissible!

I'm looking at the timeline on wikipedia, and it looks like you should be saying 'January' instead of 'December':

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.

Maybe the Chinese actually counted the people dying of the flu, instead of every death where the deceased also had the virus.

It seems that if you have the virus in your body (test positive), and you die, then with a high probability the virus caused your death (since it only stays in the body for ~10 days).

Yes, but if you have comorbidities, it's easy for people to claim the cormorbidity is the cause of death.

> I could care less about actual case counts - few countries are close to having the capacity to test everyone so who cares.

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...

What was the average age in Wuhan?

This is a false equivalency. China is a totalitarian state that quite literally controls information; Japan and the US are not in any real sense. About six months ago, on a different HN topic, I said this about China's claim that foreigners committed crimes and thus couldn't leave the country:

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.

For what it’s worth, the Japanese justice system has an over 99% conviction rate.

Sure, absolutely the Japanese justice system has some serious problems, just as the American one does. But let's not pretend that they're remotely comparable to the CCP.

> unlikely-to-be-convicted cases

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

Assuming that is accurate, do they just perhaps take a different approach to who they bother to prosecute?

Justice systems are really hard to compare considering the different circumstances.

Yeah and you're guilty until proven otherwise practically.

This in a system that still has a death penalty is quite unsettling.

This 99% number does not mean what people think it means. The Japanese prosecution system is a pipeline that strongly filters out unlikely-to-be-convicted cases from the very beginning. Long before you are convicted, you might not even be arrested, or your case gets dismissed earlier in the pipeline. Here is a video, with references, from a relatively trustworthy source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINAk2xl8Bc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkoQjIBA_3U&feature=youtu.be

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?

If you're going to parrot this factoid without context, please see the rebuttal here:

https://youtu.be/OINAk2xl8Bc

Whats that number like in the US? Is it also 99%?

95%

I call it “crying wolf in reverse”

Isn't that just normal "crying wolf"?

> This is a false equivalency. China is a totalitarian state that quite literally controls information; Japan and the US are not in any real sense.

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.

> China is a totalitarian state that quite literally controls information; Japan and the US are not in any real sense.

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.

As I said, this is a false equivalence.

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 comparison is about government manufactured misinformation, not media transparency. US government absolutely puts out comparable propaganda as China.

And yet most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

The US lies differently than China. But the lies work all the same.

I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but I think you're missing a key part of the picture. Any jurisdiction can lie if they want, for a while, but at a certain point this is an actual disease that causes actual illness and death. You can't hide hundreds or thousands of people dying from respiratory failure and you can't hide overwhelmed hospitals or auxiliary medical tents. Not for very long at least.

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.

There are wild accusations against Chinese government, when in fact we now see that they put the most stringent measures to avoid the escalation of this virus, which in fact they succeeded in doing, at least inside China. On the other hand, I live in one of the early focus of the virus in the USA, and the federal and local authorities told us to just wash hands, avoid handshakes, and continue our normal life. Against a virus that is treated in other countries with hazmat suits! In my opinion THIS is criminal, on the same level of what happened in Chernobyl, knowing everything that we knew about the crisis situation in China and Korea. Now the virus is out of control in the US and the government still has the nerve to tell us that this is the fault of someone else.

China lied about literally EVERYTHING.

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.

> Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie,

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.

Or you are just too deep in your personal bias. Even if you don't trust the numbers at the face value, there are external things you can observe. Provincial movement bans are lifted, factories are returning to work, restaurants are opening again. No government, authoritarian or not, would make that call if the cases are not under control.

> Or you are just too deep in your personal bias.

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.

Citations that point to restaurants opening being faked? Factory opening being faked? Travel ban lifted being faked? Please do.

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

"Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie"

"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.

I think GP was probably being hyperbolic. Speaking with temperament sadly doesn't work well on the Internet.

Regardless, HN prides itself on reasoned debate, and straw man/flamebait responses are against the TOS here.

Who assumes Japan's numbers are honest? We all know they've been cooking their numbers for the stupid olympics.

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.

> 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.

I'm assuming the author is referring to the weather, and the fact Korea is colder in winter and spring.

i dont know if their data is bogus or not but I can tell you that japan has engineered their society with infection control in mind. if people are even the least bit under the weather they put on a face mask. Many people who directly interface with large numbers of people wear them all the time (clerks, train station employees etc). hygiene is very important. many more doors are automatic than in most of the world. anything that can be touchless usually is. when any authority even hints that they want their passengers/employees/citizens to do or not do something it is taken a command and followed rigorously.

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"

The automatic doors might be the quiet heroes here. Given that hands have proved to be among the predominant avenues for the virus spread, I have been keen to monitor where my hands are put into use here in Japan. The only door knobs I have to turn on a normal day routine are my apartment and office doors. Any other place: from convenient stores, ATMs to buildings, automatic doors are quietly but effectively protecting the masses

> Given that hands have proved to be among the predominant avenues for the virus spread

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.

Meanwhile people just assume Japan's numbers must be honest because... why?

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.

> Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers.

The phenomenon you're describing is called a reputation.

> Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers.

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...

> Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie

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.

All of China's public numbers are fiction, all information is suppressed and censored, numbers created at the local and regional level are fabricated, credible accounting principles do not exist, Chinese companies cannot withstand any reasonable external audit.

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.

> Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie

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.

What is the reason behind doctored numbers? I mean, I can understand during normal time - governments and politicians and bureaucrats like all the time to make themselves look good. But during a pandemic/emergency, lying is only going to backfire, no?

Like, how long can they lie? a week? a month? Eventually they're going to get caught, no?

I think the main issue is that the Internet (especially reddit, and to a lesser extent, HN) is just not a good place for nuanced discussion.

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...

> Mass surveillance network

Citation needed.

Live traffic feeds are common here in the US[1] and other countries.

[1] https://transportation.arlingtonva.us/live-traffic-cameras/

[deleted]

So? Having a traffic cam and/or having a traffic cam live feed does not prove that country has a 'mass surveillance network'.

[deleted]

Am I missing something from your rebuttal? Where are 'phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others' in South Korea?

"> Mass surveillance network

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.

So what? Are you saying that South Korea has mass surveillance system because it’s close to China?

The comment was in reference to South Korea, not to China.

At least that is how I read it.

>" 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!"

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-...

> Meanwhile people just assume Japan's numbers must be honest because... why?

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.

The big difference is that the chines communist party is actively suppressing messages And prosecuting people who go against the governments narrative.

No idea why this is downvoted because it's literally what's happening in China, regardless of the failures elsewhere.

Downvoted maybe because spelling and capitalization errors?

Edit: Holy crispy, it's just an idea of mine, not an assertion or endorsement or confirmation. Geeze.

If so that's a bit mean. Not everyone here is a native English speaker.

Which is a really stupid reason to down-vote. Down-voting should be reserved for comments that do not contribute to the discussion. People need to be aware that there's non-native English speakers on this platform too.

If you can’t learn to write English keep reading. Being unable to capitalize or punctuate correctly is a wonderful heuristic for not trying to communicate. There are many more native speakers who are typing for their own benefit than non-natives who can profitably read this forum but can’t write.

This is an American forum in all but name. For the rest, we feel like we're eavesdropping, occasionally mumbling here and there.

> The big difference is that the chines communist party is actively suppressing messages And prosecuting people who go against the governments narrative.

Unlike the USA?

Very much unlike the USA.

Even if that was being done in the USA, that does not make it ok for China to do it and in that case both should be criticised. Otherwise that's just whataboutism and should not be tolerated.

Yes. Unlike the USA.

Surprisingly, as a person complaining about gullibility of other people, I really don't know how you came to the conclusion that everyone believes Japan's numbers.

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.

Funny that a lot of my Chinese friends and relatives in mainland China, now believe that US and many western government deliberately not carrying out tests to manipulate the numbers. They believe US etc are heading to a much worse situations than China's because of the government's incompetence, and intention to not appear incompetent.

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