1M cases of Covid, 1 pixel = 1 case | Hacker News Reader

1M cases of Covid, 1 pixel = 1 case

covidgraph.com

11 pointsFrancescoto12 comments

In Bosnia&Herzegovina, 200 previously reported COVID-19 cases were yesterday noted as false positives due to no certified labs in the region that reported the cases. The logic for reporting false positives is that a COVID-19 epidemic qualifies B&H for emergency IMF funds, which the local politicians are already smacking their lips for.

I have yet to hear any global news outlets discuss the matter of false positives, let alone launch the investigation into how the numbers are tallied. All it matters is that the numbers go up, no matter how. It's tragic how low the media has sunk.

Does anyone actually believe China’s reported numbers?

Does anyone actually believe the US'? This is not a nationalistic thing, don't make it such.

It is definitely a nationalistic thing, but that said, the U.S. is almost as nationalistic as China so no, I don't believe our numbers either

> Does anyone actually believe the US'?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

More importantly, the US isn't pretending to be a poster child of successful epidemic containment, nor did it caused the pandemic by systematically lying about how easily the virus spread between humans. The Chinese government is the sole responsible for this whole mess due to the extensive lying and disinformation campaign it mounted around the epidemic, turning it into a historical disaster.

I don't have much to say on the topic, but it's wrong to call any questioning back "whataboutism". Whataboutism applies to cases in which criticism is deflected by a replying with criticism in turn. It does not apply when the criticism can be accepted and new criticism is offered. In other words, reading support or acceptance of Chinese statistics into GP's reply effectively fabricates "whataboutism". The point, in a charitable reading, is "Sure, Chinese numbers can't be trusted. But can the U.S.'s numbers be trusted?" - this interpretation does not lend any support to China, and merely points out that we need to be skeptical of both. The origin of the concept whataboutism lies with the USSR deflecting criticism by saying what the US was doing is worse. It was not an admission and then mutual criticism. That's the key difference.

Case 1 (whataboutism):

A: China can't be trusted to give out accurate numbers.

B: Oh really? What about the US? The US is doing worse!

Case 2 (not whataboutism):

A: China can't be trusted to give out accurate numbers.

B: Maybe that's true - but can the US' numbers be trusted either?

Indeed, my comment is to point out that no large country seems to be handling this very well or transparently. There is a lot of face-saving going on by everyone as leaders scramble to preserve reputation in every place on Earth, to varying degrees.

Smaller countries seem to be doing less of it. I'm not sure if that's due to some inherent trait, or simply correlated with size. Large countries are all operating IMO shamefully, lying blatantly in predictable ways through the ascent phases. It seems to me inaccurate to pick out any single one.

Apparently many local Chinese, including the government of a neighboring province, do not believe in the reported numbers.

Recently on March 25, the central government ordered to end the isolation imposed on cities of Hubei (the epicenter province). But the police from Jiangxi province (which borders Hubei) blocked the people from Hubei for fear of epidemic, resulting in a clash [1]. One reason why Jiangxi distrusted the official propaganda is that the Beijing government still have stricter measures for Hubei residents.

[1]: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Clashes-and-protests:-Hubei-r...

And regardless of the trust issues, the numbers from China may be measured differently from other places. For example, asymptomatic cases were not reported as positives, deaths due to complications did not count towards COVID-19 deaths, etc.

It would be nice if y axis in the graph of cases starts at 0K instead of 10K. For other graph where the y range is smaller than the offset, it is better to cut the unused part, but in this case sadly the range is much bigger than 10K. (Also, cutting the axes makes the graph difficult to read by non technical people.)

Starting at 10K makes the most sense because getting from 0-10K may be short or long, but after it should reflect the rate of infection more relatively

The graph can have an y-axis starting at 0, and still have all the data points start at 10k.

Oh my bad, I thought you meant the x-axis

Reply on news.ycombinator.com