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Comment by hereforphone | Hacker News Reader

Of course the daily stats aren't accurate. Not nearly so, I believe. Some nations have better capability for testing. Some nations have people wealthy enough to get tested or provide free testing, whereas others do not. In some places, knowledge of COVID-19 does not exist.

Does / did anyone really believe that the USA is the leading the death count, when countries with more questionable infrastructure and huge populations like China and India exist?

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I would never trust the Chinese government to publish accurate numbers. But their society definitely kept pre-Omicron covid cases really low. Their infrastructure to identify and quarantine cases is much better than the US's or Europe's since they are an authoritarian state.

In Egypt the minimum wage for public sector workers is EGP 2,400 per month. A rapid test costs about EGP 700. Are the case numbers accurate when even a rapid test costs as much as a third of one's monthly salary?

China has pretty good testing infrastructure that they use aggressively when any cases are found. Surely the residents of Xi’an are being swabbed every week now.

But China is much more developed than India.

China has pretty propaganda-heavy testing infrastructure - they do heavily publicised one-off mass testing of entire cities which the state media points to as proof of their superiority over other countries which aren't doing that, but outside of that testing appears to be extremely questionable. They've had pretty astounding incidents like not testing people hospitalized with Covid symptoms in the one province which had known, uncontrolled community spread at the time at a point when Western countries (or at least the UK) were systematically testing anyone who went near a hospital. And of course testing entire cities is going to miss recently infected people and doesn't help find cases outside the city boundary, which is likely more common than they let on...

It’s not just propaganda though. Anyone who has family or friends in China has heard gripes about how much testing they are being subject to. You can’t really dismiss them as being brainwashed with the party line or something. China has a zero COVID policy, and they are extremely aggressive about that. I guess you are arguing that these policies are just applied to the cities and not the villages?

Does China have a motivation to be honest about their figures? Did they a year ago, or two years ago? Even if they're honest now, no doubt they were first hesitant once the cat (COVID-19 in this case) got out of the bag?

China isn’t North Korea, there are plenty of information paths between China and the rest of the world that doesn’t go through the party. The party has motivation to be honest in so much that if they weren’t honest, it would be obvious very quickly that they weren’t tame they’d lose face.

Back when COVID first came out, local officials on the ground were hesitant to bring attention to what they thought was a minor problem at the time. Even when the deaths began piling up, they were still trying to hide from the central government, and even then, plenty of information was leaking to the outside, everyone knew something was up even if they weren’t sure what it was. However, once the central government got involved, well, any chance of deception at the local level was off the table. The central government doesn’t really have a boss to hide things from, so in that case, things work out for transparency (but, ya, if they thought they could hide something, they would be tempted to for face reasons).

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