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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

I'm so sick and tired of this conspiracy theory going all around reddit. Do we have any reason to disbelieve China's numbers are orders of magnitudes wrong? China's numbers are wrong in the same way Italy and USA's numbers are wrong, because data collection is flawed. It is also very plausible to claim China has incentive to hide new infections in their country. Even US has incentive to have this to minimize the panic. But claiming a country with 1.3 billion people, who recently accepted WHO to audit their pandemic management has a massive epidemic when they're reporting almost no new patients is "US didn't go to the moon" level conspiracy theory. Please put your tin foil hat away.

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No, it's not. Other sources of data show a massive drop in population in China correlating to the disease. There is a massive amount of evidence that China grossly under-reported case counts and deaths. I know people love to shill for China, but remember they jailed the doctor who first identified the new disease (who is now dead) and ejected all American reporters from the country after they started reporting about the massive amount of deaths being recorded as "unknown pneumonia" and not attributed to COVID-19 in Wuhan.

Studies have suggested that something like 80% of Covid-19 infections in China were not reported. In addition, recently there was credible reporting concerning the numbers of cremation urns released post-lockdown. I don't think it's reasonable to talk "tin foil hat". I do think it's reasonable to continue to seek factual answers to important questions.

> Do we have any reason to disbelieve China's numbers are orders of magnitudes wrong?

Crematoriums in Wuhan seem to be doing more than the usual number of cremations:

https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/88435z/wuhans-crematorium...

Crematoriums tend to operate at capacity, just 5-10% increases in death rate would easily overwhelm them.

Seems unlikely. An extra 5-10% would be an extra hour of operation a day.

yes we do have reason to disbelieve [0]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-residents-say-chinese-...

so how about this

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-con...

I don't wear a tin foil hat and I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

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