Is there any way to independently confirm China's claims? AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists so that they have sole control over the truth.
>AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists so that they have sole control over the truth.
I'm not able to find a source to confirm that, but I do see some news articles from earlier this year abiut China revoking press credentials for journalists from 3 US news outlets. AFAICT from searching, journalists from other countries and news outlets are not affected.
I disagree with the conclusion here by looking at what people are willing to do locally.
A tad misleading, if people cannot communicate publicly about people getting sick or hear this from media, why wouldn't they go to a music festival? They wouldn't know. Interested to hear your thoughts
Aren't music festivals exactly the place you would expect high levels of risk taking around crowds?
I think you underestimate the power of government propaganda.
If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.
It's not like covid is the black plague, bodies don't pile up in the streets no matter how bad it gets. Some elderly die here and there and life moves on (and plus it doesn't spread all that fast because mask usage is a cultural thing there anyway).
I just have a hard time believing that a country with as much corruption, pollution, and just general lack of sanitation as China does has "completely eradicated" the virus, meanwhile South Korea is taking containment measures for its latest wave.
I think more it's more likely China just put on a dog and pony show for the world, but really they haven't eradicated covid at all and the citizens are just kept in ignorance. This is, of course, gross speculation with no evidence to back it up. But in my mind it's like "the most populous country on the planet claims they've only had 4,634 deaths total due to covid, hmm..." and I start to think I'm being lied to by a country that wants to save face on the world stage.
Then again, maybe this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies. When you have a god king that can force 11 million people to take a medical test within 14 days (or else?), you have an upper hand over countries where stuff like "due process" and "deliberation" slow down policy making.
Nonsense. Chinese people aren't an unthinking monolith. Like anywhere else, some people believe whatever the government tells them, some people believe any old nonsense on social media and some are savvy and sceptical.
The only thing more effective than Chinese censorship of the internet is the efforts of Chinese citizens to satirise and subvert it.
I think the level of naivete on your part shows someone who doesn't worry about getting called for tea.
There is clear evidence of the virus being taken care of, so I'm pretty sure if numbers are off, they're off in the same way GDP is padded, and not orders of magnitude off.
> this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies
Yes, and I'd go further and say it's not just democracies and dictatorships but cultures of individualism and collectivism. It's no coincidence that east asia has done so well (South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore) compared to the US and much of Europe.
If the coverup was effective why wouldn’t they? We know the Chinese government is extremely good at propagandizing their own citizens.
You'd be mistaken. Some American correspondents have had their visas revoked and Tibet and Xianjing are effectively off-limits, but there are huge numbers of foreign journalists working in China.
Basically it seems they do have things well under control.
Hospitals are sending their data directly to the white house bypassing the CDC. [1]
https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/white-house-hospitals-...
Bring up how people are dying and it's terrible? Automatic upvotes. Attempt discussion about the tradeoffs of the lockdown (economy vs lives)? That person is stupid and uneducated and a Trump supporter - automatic downvotes.
It's pointless to even attempt a discussion that isn't simply lamenting deaths. Don't waste your time like I have.
I find that unacceptable so let's talk.
Long story short I think that the economy will pick up again once this all blows over and that whatever negative consequences there are from a lockdown are still better than hundreds of thousands of people dying.
One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101.
I realise now that I'm doing exactly what you were criticizing (lamenting deaths) but I'd really like to hear your counter argument.
I see people saying “let’s wait for a vaccine” but what if a vaccine doesn’t appear for years?
How many deaths of despair are worth it?
How many domestic violence cases counterbalance one 70-year-old person dying (the average age of a covid death)?
How many people going bankrupt is worth saving the life of a single person? What if I told you that going bankrupt is associated with increased likelihood of death?
And so on... single-variate analysis of such a complex issue is doomed to fail, but that’s basically all I see.
The argument of the anti-lockdown crowd (at least as I understand it) is that the second- and third-order effects are just rich people going bankrupt, but middle- and lower-class people being forced into dire economic straights up to and including starvation, or a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions.
Isn't that more of a symptom of a broken healthcare system?
It's actually fairly normal for HN, posts very often attract a few stray downvotes when they don't really deserve it (the set of people who can vote is broad enough that that is blind to happen) and if that happens early on you'll often end up with a undeserved negative net score.
And it'll usually go away fairly soon, which is one of the reasons for the guideline about not discussing the votes a post receives. It is almost always a waste of time that will provoke one or more people to get up on a soapbox about the way they perceive a viewpoint to be systematically suppressed on HN, often about the same time the score recovers to net positive, never to return to net down voted status, so all that's left in the subthread is a bunch of conspiracy theories explaining why HN is biased against a message with a positive net score.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/14/876584284/fired-florida-data-...
[2] https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/white-house-hospitals-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat...
Chinese people are incapable of thinking for themselves and anything you personally hear from one should be disregarded as brainwashing.
With an attitude like this, I see no hope for meaningful future cooperation. Everybody on board the cold war train.
China isn't North Korea. You can use VPN to access the broader internet. And if you have an American SIM card, all your traffic gets routed through the US so you can access the full internet (it's just painfully slow).
No, that's not correct.
It would be hard to verify, of course, and there could well be some unreported cases, but it's simply not plausible that China's seeing a US scale outbreak, or even an EU-scale one, without anyone noticing.