China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says | Hacker News Reader

China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says

bloomberg.com

99 pointspl0x43 comments

While im extremely skeptical of China's numbers (by default it's safer to assume that all known case counts in any country are well off the real numbers of cases that haven't been counted) China did use far harsher measures to stop spread (the biggest, most total quarantine of hundreds of millions of people, applied in just weeks), while the U.S has so far not done that or anything close to it, and was very slow even to react to the extent that it has so far.

This could thus partly be a case of accusing the other side of lying because you look so bad that blame needs to be spread around even if they did things differently to mitigate their situation better (maybe).

Also, China published the vast majority of major case growth/death figures before they (or anyone else really) knew just how bad things would get in Italy, Spain and other countries, yet their mortality rates more or less match a certain global average (they're in fact a bit worse than average) so why would they have lied in such a specific but also partially statistically realistic way? Why not publish less cases and lower death figures if they were going to lie their asses off anyhow?

I don't think they're telling the truth, especially about total known cases and total deaths, but maybe they didn't conceal quite as badly as claimed, and harsher measures partly explain the differences in numbers between the U.S and China.

Most of all though, it's important to know if whatever concealment they did also distorted: 1. claimed mortality RATE, and 2. if the spread of the virus has been more or less contained finally, as they claim it has. These two are the most important things, more important than actual numbers being off by some margin or another.

If they do collect actual numbers but report much lower numbers it should not be too difficult to give realistic ones. Right now the Chinese state media is making a huge effort to paint the virus as a 'foreign' issue, claiming that there are now no new local infections but rather just infections brought in from abroad. This is rather obviously absurd, but it's also obviously an effort to shift blame while claiming a high ground. The Chinese leadership can pretend competence and blame others for any fault - pretending that it wasn't them that started the whole mess to begin with.

India (of all countries) had a severe virus outbreak a few years back - immediately local doctors reported it, containment measures were in place and the case numbers stayed somewhere around two hundred. China had the same, but arrested whistleblowers, officially denied everything and only admitted things when the scale and spread was so bad that it couldn't anymore be denied. Still we don't know the true scale and numbers and never will.

How is it "obviously absurd"? We've been the ones lamenting that China's been going full dystopia "welding people inside apartments" all the way back in January.

Also for those who read beyond the title:

"the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents."

And here I am still waiting for Bloomberg to write the other half of their supermicro chip story.

"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

It's a little too convenient that the US blew so many weeks of lead time in getting mass testing running. We don't need to suppress information about our virus outbreak when we simply don't have data about it. We literally would've had a better response if the CDC didn't exist at all and individual states weren't impeded from running their own tests. The Seattle Flu Study was explicitly forbidden from testing for coronavirus, and their refusal to obey that order on ethical grounds was probably the reason that they're not suffering New York's fate right now.

Not to absolve China here, but it's a classic sin of nations to hide epidemics (see "Spanish Flu") and they probably aren't even the most egregious sinners today.

How come European Union countries, South Korea and Taiwan weren't hiding the issue then? They were unaware of the scale for a while, but even Italy did not try for a minute to hide it. Hiding or denying an epidemic is really something that only dictatorships do.

I think the degree to which countries hide their numbers matches the degree to which they're authoritarian (or simply corrupt). North Korea sets the bar, with "zero" cases. Russia has suspiciously low numbers. Japan, surprisingly, is not doing well in this area. I think Japan early on was hell-bent on having their olympics happen regardless of the consequences, and their people are going to suffer for it.

> Russia has suspiciously low numbers.

The virus simply freezes and won't infect in Russia /s

I'm in Canada and we have surprisngly few cases where we are, relative to the population size (Edmonton). We've had snow and a cold snap, which is definitely keeping people inside.

I don't doubt that Russia is downplaying their cases, but I can absolutely believe that the cold is making people self-isolate, and thus keep infection down.

There is some evidence that Italy has had 4x more deaths than they have reported

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723647

Not everyone is dying from Corona.

There are others ways to die :)

Kind of answering your own question there!

They already knew what it was. When the outbreak started, no one knew what a coronavirus was or how to treat it. By the time, other countries started getting hit, everyone knew what it was and how to test for it.

Headline: Italy’s Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported

https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-i...

> We literally would've had a better response if the CDC didn't exist at all and individual states weren't impeded from running their own tests.

That's a very strong assertion that needs proof. Testing is important, but so are many other things like access to hospital beds, ventilators, face masks, etc.

Plus you are assuming that states would have been uniformly aggressive in testing and countermeasures, which is manifestly not the case. (See Louisiana, Florida, and NYC for examples.)

> That's a very strong assertion that needs proof.

The proof is self-evident. There are a plethora of commercial labs that were not allowed to do testing, and the CDC's one blessed test was a failure. Had they not been the sole blessed entity allowed to do testing, states could've run things better on their own.

Better testing could've contained it long enough to allow us to prepare for the mitigation phase we're thrown into, unprepared again.

As for the states, not every state would've done well, but it's practically impossible for it to be handled worse than the way it was. The US response has been a disaster from the top down.

I'm not excusing the poor execution on the part of the US government--it's been awful. But it seems to me that the core problem has been leadership not taking the advice of scientists rather than whether the CDC exists or not.

If you are going to run 'what if' scenarios it's worth asking what if somebody like Mario Cuomo had been in the White House in early January? (Or any of several other US governors for that matter.)

> If you are going to run 'what if' scenarios it's worth asking what if somebody like Mario Cuomo had been in the White House in early January? (Or any of several other US governors for that matter.)

I have been thinking all along that even someone who has been dead for five years would be a suitable replacement for current leadership.

Seriously though, yes, Andrew Cuomo is a walking demonstration of what competent leadership looks like. I wish we had that at the federal level.

This nonsense has been debunked weeks ago.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-misplaced-blame-on-...

There was no rule anyone has found that restricted other labs from testing.

on 17th of January:

> The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission’s daily update declares, “A total of 763 close contacts have been tracked, 665 medical observations have been lifted, and 98 people are still receiving medical observations. Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”

So, the CCP (China Commmunist Party) is still lying about it on the 17th of January. This is weeks after Chinese doctors in the hospital are well aware of what's going on, and had tried to get word out. However, this is what happened to them:

> The Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued summons to Dr. Li Wenliang, accusing him of “spreading rumors.” Two days later, at a police station, Dr. Li signed a statement acknowledging his “misdemeanor” and promising not to commit further “unlawful acts.” Seven other people are arrested on similar charges and their fate is unknown.

This head fake by the CCP, and the collaboration of the WHO, threw off the CDC and many others.

Yes, the CDC screwed up and should have been more skeptical of the CCP and should have had a better game plan, but that is in a whole different category than the actions of the CCP.

Not even that, but the WHO was forced to give critical information to China and was not allowed to communicate with Taiwan.

Taiwan handled it very well luckily! They never had any information from China and that helped them more than us who had "access" to that information, probably faulty info none the less.

What an absurd situation.

It's becoming more clear that the WHO was misled by the "positive news" from China and based a lot of guidance on that.

While the Western world gets infected, the virus gets real numbers eg. Infection rate, mortality, ...

If it wasn't clear that Taiwan is a seperate country before, it should be now.

As a modeler, in a field unrelated to pandemics and epidemiology, my first reaction was that the estimates of CRF, IFR and R0 are going to be wrong. Which in turn is going to produce wrong estimates from all the models.

First, they did not shutdown the wet markets which they should have right after SARs, then they concealed the outbreak for weeks or months and now they are lying about the numbers.

How can the Chinese government keep doing this and think they are going to keep getting away with it? They are willing to invest 100s of billions in One Belt One Road to project power but this takes down their credibility by many notches for vast swathes of people around the globe.

"Conceal" implies intent--while I do not believe the Chinese numbers I do not think it's malicious, but rather an overwhelmed system. We are seeing the same thing everywhere the system is getting hit hard enough--patients are dying without ever being tested, and they're only testing the people at the hospital, thus missing most all the mild cases.

The only places I would trust the numbers are South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Israel.

China is literally claiming zero new infections while reports from the affected regions tell a very different story. How is that not an obvious effort to conceal the issue?

What reports?

China reported 36 new cases yesterday, all but one are people returning from overseas caught under quarantine, and whenever there is sporadic local transmission, they tighten control in that area obviously while the country at large has returned to work.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3078010/chin...

> while I do not believe the Chinese numbers I do not think it's malicious

Give the reports of outright abuse of power (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquir...) or corruption, depending on your perspective, I'm not sure why you would say it wasn't malicious. It's been about saving face, if recovery was possible. If not, shrug What are you going to do about it anyway? Trusting anything from official Chinese reports, is foolish. You always need some sort of 3rd party corroboration to get to the truth and the WHO has shown bias (subject to Chinese influence, for their own pragmatic reasons of access).

That being said, their model, wherein they locked down populations was effective and appropriate. Combined with testing and some sort of ID-based tagging, the US could probably manage better than the current course, which will just blow up later anyway.

The Chinese state is the scariest censorship machine in human history. Specifically, in this situation, Doctors were detained and punished for speaking out about this early on, including one that later died of Covid

What did the CIA or NSA been doing in the mean time with all that budget ... aren't they supposed to be informed of all things affecting national security around the globe ???.

Did they really expect that an adversarial superpower would admit to the scale of their problem ... the US should have been way better prepared.

I am sure they did provide detailed analysis, the issue is we have a president that is not intellectually curious or concerned with information -- instead he believes in his "gut feelings" over all else (and has said as much when talking about how he views intelligence services).

Also the political cronies with no clue appointed after the good people with all the experience left because they disagreed.

I wondered about this. I've started to think they probably see a lot of threats, tell people, and it's more or less dismissed if it's not immediately clear why it's a threat.

Clearly the west dropped the ball in important ways, but guidance from the WHO was certainly bad and seemingly deferential to China and its reputation. But if there’s evidence the data and reporting is “concealed,” on top of the clear silencing of doctors (Ai Fen and others), this is egregious.

First of all, nobody knew what it was, what it did and what it could do when it first hit. No one said, "oh, this is the coronavirus COVID-19, and this is the test for it." All this had to be discovered as it got worse.

I want to know why this pandemic blew up right after the mysterious vape flu in August last year that has the exact same symptoms as COVID-19 and why this flared up in Wuhan after soldiers from all over the world, about 200 from the US, were in Wuhan for the World Military Games.

Wet markets and exotic meats are all over China. Why did it just start in Wuhan?

It is painfully obvious that china concealed the beginnings of the outbreak, no matter your personal political beliefs, or nationality.

To assert anything else, particularly under the guise of (so and so also did this), highlights your comment as insincere. Lets keep the politics out of HN.

It's also true that many if not most countries have been reluctant to face up to the scale of the pandemic. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government's obfuscation will turn out to be more or less damaging to the overall response than the inaction of other governments. We're a long way from the end of this episode.

TL;DR no matter what you think, I'm right. If you think anything else, you're a horrible person. First and final word, let's stop talking about it. This is not a cult /s

> The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents.

These days, I'm going to be more surprised if journalism didn't start with this since the overton window moved so much that this is the norm now.

Typical techniques used by "professional" "journalist" to cover up and diverge the real issue, which is the incompetency of the US government.

You see when you fail at something, isn't it easy to blame someone else, rather than looking at yourself?

And REMEMBER these journalists are PAID to write.

And YOU, the reader, are only able to comprehend what you are prepared to hear.

Worth pointing out that China's on the ground response was light years ahead of ours in the US. Faster, more coordinated, more robust, calmer..

Assuming this is correct, what is the estimated death toll in China due to COVID-19, preferably from a reliable source ?

I'm curious what actual infection and death rates are in China- there seems to be no mentioning in the article. Given what is happening in Italy and Spain, its probably horrible. :(

How come Korea had it under control so quickly, "given" that China "obviouly" "conceled" the information?

Blame blame blame...more blame

US mounting hybrid warfare

does anyone take US intelligence seriously any more? seems we have a fairly reliable years-long evidence trail that says it might not be worth it any more.

either they're legitimately incompetent (tons of sabre-rattling about the China "threat" yet no intel operations; likely hasn't been rebuilt after China publicly executed tons of spies [quite an effective deterrent it seems]) and they're saying as much here, or they're just deflecting outrage on an external entity doing typical IC stuff, which is complete noise.

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