Hacker News Reader

Comment by ckdarby | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone believe the numbers that China has given?

I asked as I see everyone use them to compare against but then I see articles popping up talking about reporters who reported difference numbers just vanish over night.

View on HN

Different government track the numbers differently. While I do believe Chinese government uses the best way to make it looks good on them, but I don't think the 'actual number' will be drastically different. Because if they do, then it's releasing false signal to citizen, which could cause a second wave of infection. There is a very aggressive surveillance method in place, which I doubt is acceptable by other countries: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/china-coronaviru...

I personally don't believe them for a variety of reasons: I don't know that any country's numbers are entirely accurate, the substantial reports of active suppression of reporting about it (leaked communication, disappeared providers etc), and features of the reported data are suspicious.

On the other hand, there's probably an opportunity if not now than soon to start modeling the plausibility of Chinese reports. That is, a lot of them use China as a sort of baseline, but at some point things are going to get flipped on their head and the aggregate of other country's trends are going to start affording the ability to ask questions like "given what we know about the distribution of trajectories in other places, how plausible is it that data from country X is valid?"

There's complications due to heterogeneity in population networks, healthcare, response, etc. but I think quickly we're going to start seeing things being sorted out empirically. You can only hide things for so long.

There's a little trick a government can pull to at least make the death rates look smaller:

https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/

Simply classify the cause of death to be the virus only in tested and confirmed cases (U07.1 COVID-19, virus identified).

That's what my country's (Poland) government is doing and lo and behold - our numbers are relatively small.

That's no longer the case as of April 1st:

https://www.pzh.gov.pl/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/wytyczne-d...

Doctors are deciding what the cause of death was, not the government. The only way to find out how many people died due to this epidemics is to compare the average death rate before and during epidemics. It will also include people withot ncov-19 that died due to health care system being overloaded.

The exact numbers? Of course not. Especially early on, they were suppressing information in addition to just not having complete information themselves. The cat's out of the bag at this point though, with WHO observers and foreign reporters on the ground. Even if there's some fudging and incompleteness, the overall trajectory of the infection curve is likely about right.

Does anyone believe the numbers being reported by anyone? There is no way possible to accurately provide numbers. There's not enough tests. Not everyone is holding their hand up and saying I have a fever, but I'm not going to the doctor for a test that may or may not be available.

since the criticisms of the Chinese numbers tend to be wild derivations from urns or anonymously sourced US propaganda, yes I am inclined to believe the numbers.

If you are seeing these articles "pop up" then you read fake news btw

Given the number of times the Chinese government has been shown to lie and actively try to hide dissenting people/information when it tells a story they don't want told... I think it's fair to start from a point of distrust. Sure, it doesn't mean they're lying about the numbers here, but they started out this whole thing by lying about it, by throwing someone (a doctor?) that did speak out in jail.

They did not throw any doctor in jail.

I don't trust the Chinese government but I think if they were lying then their opponents would be able to build a more persuasive case by now.

My apologies, I was mis-remembering. Dr. Li Wenliang was arrested, questioned, and officially reprimanded for warning about the Corona virus outbreak. Looking now, I don't see that he was actually thrown in jail.

That being said, it does still speak to the point of the Chinese government and their attempts to control the narrative. At least for me, that makes me start from a point of distrust over anything they say.

I don't see how obvious discrepancies between the official Wuhan death toll and on-the-ground accounts constitute "wild" derivations.

Moreover, Radio Free Asia is quoting named residents, so this cannot plausibly be described "anonymously sourced US propaganda" or "fake news". [1]

In general, I think one should be skeptical of any statistics produced by a totalitarian dictatorship for Western consumption.

[1] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wuhan-deaths-03272020...

by fake news I was referring to the "disappeared journalists", no credible source has made such allegations

I would suggest that you look at the region-level data for China, and just see if it looks anything like the European data.

For my money, I don't trust the US intelligence community but I still think that the Chinese numbers are somewhat implausible.

The charts show an identical dropoff in almost every region at the same time. We can see, from the European experience, that there's a lag between lockdown and case saturation. This does not appear in the Chinese data, which makes me somewhat sceptical.

Note that I'm not an epidemiologist, so it's possible that there's something else driving those numbers that I'm missing.

How can we trust a country that that is willing to block Tiananmen Square or even Winnie the Pooh from social media?

I don’t think the great firewall will let the bad news come out

Reply on news.ycombinator.com