No one died in China of Covid since April 15th 2020
worldometers.info
worldometers.info
It's tempting to believe that the Chinese government just doesn't give a damn what people think, and are therefore willing to say anything at all. But if they really don't care, why lie in the first place?
The only interpretation that I can come up with that makes sense is that a) the government of China is reluctant to admit to any fault at all, b) the actual number of deaths is low but not impressively low, and c) the Chinese press (including social media) is very tightly controlled, and d) by b and c the government can get away with saying there are no deaths without looking like idiots.
edit: After 50 years, TIL that URRS and USSR are synonyms.
A lie you want me to believe is an admission of weakness. You're effectively saying you're ashamed of telling me the truth. Claiming zero deaths is a lie you don't want me to believe. You want me to know you're lying. It's half "none of your fucking business", half "what are you going to do about it?"
this basically becomes a huge prisoner's dilemma, no body in charge wants to look bad.
Western governments don't try to lie about it (I hope) and they still underestimate the real numbers by ~50%. China shockingly doesn't publish (perhaps they don't even have that data) excess deaths for the whole country and they never did.
So it's impossible to try and figure it out from there. They are doing some serious mental gymnastics ( https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/01/china/china-birthrate-202... ) about changes in birth rate to explain change in total population though. So, perhaps there are more excess deaths there as well
One of the banner hung in school yard translated to English:
"The Communist Party is a party that never make mistakes."
It's tempting to believe that the Chinese government just doesn't give a damn what people think, and are therefore willing to say anything at all.
The only interpretation that I can come up with that makes sense is that they just choosed the mose closed digit after 1 without looking like idiots.
Guess what? If you find a state which is too unbelievalbe to be a lie, it has a very big chance that it is not a lie, unless you really get a evidence to against it.
I am sorry be emotinal if you are really seriously to anaylis. However just because you are probably seriouse, I really want to points out you are in the wrong way. When you are driving in highway and find a sign sys 'WRONG WAY GO BACK'. You should go back, but not turn left, breaking roadbed and drive to the wild field.
There has been no sustained local transmission within China since then. There are small clusters of cases that occur when the virus somehow breaches the border protections (e.g., 3-week quarantine for all incoming passengers). There's a very quick reaction whenever this happens, and the outbreak is ended within days to weeks.
The Xi'an outbreak, with 2,000 cases in total, is the most serious outbreak China has had since April 2020. There are small cities in the US with more cases than that every day. Exponential growth is brutal, so China can remain at ultra-low numbers, as long as it detects and contains outbreaks early.
That's why there have been only a handful of deaths (contrary to the title of this thread, there have been a few reported deaths) since April 2020.
There are plenty of people here on Hacker News who either live in China or have friends/family there. It just seems to be the people who don't have any contact with the country who have a hard time believing what's going on in China. I sort of understand: China's pandemic experience has been so different from that of the West that it can be difficult to accept as reality.
China was quick to boast that they had no cases. None. The WHO liaisons pointed out how unlikely this was, and that they should immediately start testing their gay population. China said they only had two gay men, and neither tested positive.
Don't believe China. They are —for any way that matters— above laws and decency. They only say things to make China look good.
It's of course worth noting that China is one of the countries that stopped reporting excess deaths themselves since it would be pretty obvious that if China e.g. reported a million excess deaths then the majority could likely be attributed to SARS2 (whether they die directly from the virus or starve as a result of their brutal lockdowns).
Also range starts from MINUS 150K, i.e. excess life. Which makes more sense considering the source Economist used to extrapolate excess deaths for PRC concluded excess deaths was lower outside of Hubei/Wuhan in the months post lockdown [0] and things have been basically normal since due to aggressive covid zero policies. Other countries that aggressively contained covid also has excess life stats.
They are using excess deaths of Western countries, and projecting those death rates to China.
I'd you think that this is garbage, it is, and the Economist seriously fell off.
However given there have been a number of small outbreaks they have either been very lucky it has never spread to a vulnerable person or they have covered up several deaths over the last year.
Western journalists and businessmen are on the ground throughout the country (not to mention family ties and communications between expat Chinese and their families) and if there were a major outbreak of COVID killing dozens or hundreds, i dont think they’d be able to cover it up.
We know several other countries with less strict policies than China maintained zero COVID for quite some time, or states within those countries (Australia for instance had COVID outbreaks they successfully confined to one or two states). Once delta hit, it became too difficult for those countries to continue, but we can see China is more authoritarian and their stricter measures may still be effective for now.
If deer get it and get good immunity when they recover, they won't necessarily be a long term reservoir, and so on.
The result of these harsh restrictions is that there haven't been major outbreaks, I think the worst we ever got was about 120 infections daily, and only 213 deaths overall, with the last one being on September 14th.
The downside of this, is that the vaccination rate in HK is very low, because there's no difference between being vaccinated or not. You're subject to the same local restrictions, and subject to the same length of quarantine when you come back.
Vaccination rate spiked up recently, because a new "wave" has started. Newly discovered cases spiked to 38, and the government announced a new two week lock down to squash it. Ironically, part of the new cluster revolves around a party thrown by some government officials and legislative counsel members.
Note: I'm personally very unhappy with the situation in Hong Kong, but try to refer from giving my personal opinion, so it's mostly just fact based.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...
As far as the number itself goes: this article [2] is pretty polemic, but it does a good job of putting the number in the context of comparables from other countries. One thing discussed is that almost every country is underreporting COVID deaths due to systematic pressures, so journalists are in a bind about how to report.
While China is an extreme example, any site that wants to show you a table of data across time and regions would require infinite footnotes to describe ways the data might be right or wrong. Worldometer has a page that describes its methods [3], which basically says their policy is to aggregated data from official sources. I think that's reasonable, although I think they could use a bigger "this may be garbage in garbage out" banner so folks don't interpret carelessly.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/world/asia/china-xian-loc... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/05/beijin... [3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/about/
To @johan_larson, you don't have to bother to give out a bullet list about your analyses. You should had learned in high school that any case study and analyses should base on data and facts. However all points you listed are based on your subjective judgment. That will be earier to just say NO I DO NOT BELIEVE IT. Just like others comments.
BTW, as a chinese living in oversea, I thanks for the chinese government to be serious about "zero case", even that brings me difficulty going back to China. As long as I know my parents are living in the one of a few country which are safe for aged people so far.
If you are young or if you are in the middle age, you don't have to care about COVID very much. You can take care about yourself. You probably die if you get it but only in a less chance. However if you have parents and/or grand parents, go to read some article about symptoms or listen to the experience of people who recovered from COVID. Imagine how suffer they were and how they fear in the mid-night when they in the bed alone. (Because the illness could take a turn for the worse very quickly, and it turns to be very dangerous if no proper treat in time.)
If it is possible by the sake of your empathy, think about how many the "zero case" stratergy saved aged people in China and praise it abit!
If you refuse to admit the above. Just don't bother to doubt unless you do get any evidence. By the sake of humanelity empathy, do your best to stop spread around you. Reduce the risk to aged people in your familty and others beloved!
People spread it, sure, but they test the entire city. The majority of cases are caught immediately.
Zero deaths really doesn't signal a cure. Low infections -> less chance of deaths. If you only have 200-300 cases a year, then there's a good chance you'd have no deaths.
So no, zero deaths doesn't mean cure, it can just as well mean very low transmission.
Every person who works in a high-risk job (e.g., airport staff, border staff, some types of medical personnel) is regularly tested.
Purchases of over-the-counter fever-reducing drugs are monitored.
That's how outbreaks are caught early. If you're interested, and if you read Chinese, you can actually learn in great detail how (almost) each outbreak over the last year-plus was detected. There are detailed contact-tracing reports on most of the outbreaks.
I love worldometers. What would you expect them to do? They aggregate official stats. I don’t expect them to use a statistical model or something, I want the real reported numbers. The only thing they could really do in my opinion is put an asterisk on the numbers that are wildly unbelievable with a small disclaimer or something. I don’t check the Chinese stats there so maybe they have done this already?
Other than that, what would you expect them to do? They can’t have country specific heuristics and different methodologies even if we “know” the count is wrong.
They lie by default and it damages in the long run.
Well, stop. You also submitted an editorialized title. Don't do that, either.
What the Chinese are doing there isn't nice. Both of my children attend sports practice this afternoon, and they really need do to that. Shutting up entire families for weeks without even five minutes of fresh air is worse than merely "not nice", it's damned harsh. But I can imagine that it'll stop transmission.
What you describe in terms of being forced to stay without food would definitely suck. The fact that you follow this up with "my children absolutely need sports" puts a frankly fairly tone-deaf slant on the rest of it.
Yes, you are right that what you describe China doing is not nice. No, you are not right that not letting children go to sports practice as a measure to keep people from literally dying is "damned harsh". It's a measure that you can get used to - and I would say not letting others (including perhaps these children) get used to it by being so against it vocally is not helping anyone.
Instead we should look for constructive ways to vent our excess energy, which everyone has and children especially do need to do, that don't involve antisocial reasoning.
I'm not trying to say that China's extremely quick escalation and general hashshness is bad overall, or that good. I could argue both sides of that question, and I don't envy the politicians who have to make the choice for each country.
China's is a harsh response, but for a neurotropic and highly infections virus maybe the choice is between an immediate harsh response and another bad outcome dictated by the virus. And maybe the other outcome is worse. I wouldn't know. (I think noone knows — several other neurotropic viruses have a knack of putting people in wheelchairs twenty year later, is this one like them?)
If the consequences that will come down upon you are severe enough, you'd probably recommend quarantining entire blocks of 500 apartments as well.
Also, the aggressive lockdown strategies are also actively causing people to be much more susceptive to other fatalities. So while no people die of Covid, many, many are suffering or even dying as a consequence, without a trace in any Covid reports.
Let's wait the end of the Beijing Olympic Games. I bet they will change their covid strategy and fully re-open for business because they need it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/05/did-pande...
Chinese interviewee: “I can’t complain!”
A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”