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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

Only a thousand daily cases in a country with a population of 1G? That's either very impressive, or very impressively underreported. For comparison, Belgium currently has 10 times as many daily new cases, with a population that's 100 times smaller (and no lockdown).

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China is engaging in some combination of not measuring/not reporting/lying on the subject of COVID infections. Ourworldindata claims [0] that their case counts are comparable to New Zealand. There needs to be a much, much more powerful argument than "they've got CCTV and powerful bureaucrats!" before anyone can take those figures seriously.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

Why the number of confirmed cases shown in [0] is even smaller than that reported by China CDC? It doesn't make sense.

I don't believe any of that crap. Have you even read that comment about being locked in a building because someone tested positive?

Prejudice. The current number of COVID cases in China is real. BTW, I think, in HN and reddit, sometimes we demonize the Chinese government too much and live in an "Information Cocoon Room" more or less.

Do you really believe the measures of China lead to 1000 times less infected people than what we see in the rest of the world?

Absolutely.

Chinese society has been largely open for the last 2 years, yet hospitals have not been overwhelmed, and hardly anyone even knows anyone who's gotten CoVID-19.

The measures that public health authorities in Chinese cities take to squash outbreaks are highly visible. If there's a single known case in a city, the building where the person lives will be locked down, the neighborhood (or even the entire city) will be PCR tested, and everyone who's been near the infected person will be quarantined. These measures work.

These measures are extreme even to China, and can only be viewed as a test of how much control the regime can have over its citizens.

The answer to that is that the regime can do anything it wants to, period.

There is no way that China after more than two years, should not have been able to vaccinate those that need the vaccine the most.

Getting COVID is no longer a huge risk and neither is avoiding infections at this point.

No, this is only about control.

And 8K deaths since 2020: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn

How the WHO can report these numbers with a straight face is beyond me.

You can try entering Beijing from the outside and see how difficult it is.

The WHO can only report what the health authorities of each country report to them.

“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

I found two interesting points after comparing numbers from WTO and China CDC (https://2019ncov.chinacdc.cn/2019-nCoV/):

1. The death toll is the same, but the number of confirmed cases reported by China CDC is much smaller than WTO (380k vs 710k). I guess people caught covid with no symptoms are excluded by China CDC.

2. After subtracting death toll in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there're only 4.6k deaths in China mainland since 2020.

I don't know about the data in that link, but China is tracking cases without symptoms, and publish those numbers each day

> How the WHO can report these numbers with a straight face is beyond me.

I think the WHO understands that they've already lost any credibility they once had and have strategically pivoted to being more of a political organization.

How you are able to have such cognitive dissonance in believing that China is an authoritarian government that locks down entire buildings because someone tested positive for a mutation of a cold virus but also not believe they have had few covid cases is beyond me.

They also have a ridiculously huge and dense urban population.

And everybody wears masks. Everybody wore masks even before the pandemic due to the pollution.

It is real, the country has been covid free since late 2020. How can you under report virus being covid free? The title is very misleading. It is not China locks down, it is a few cities will have affected communities locked down. Mostly massive testing, contract tracing and then resume to normal once cases are back to normal. My parents are in affect areas, people are less worries about the cases due the minor effect on new variant.

Unless Mainland China is doing something drastically different to what we're doing here in Hong Kong, I wouldn't be so sure.

I don't know what Hong Kong is doing, my guess is that many professionals do not want to follow what China is doing, instead, they would like to follow what UK is doing. That's a huge difference. As I said, you cannot hide virus, hide the transmission, especially during zero-covid period, before the mild variant omicron dominated the world.

I don't know how long China can continue this zero-covid policy, that's a question, people are less worried about the virus now, I hear the same from my parents. At least it is working now. Maybe not in Hong Kong.

They are doing something drastically different. Hong Kong has been very wary of entering a strict lockdown during this outbreak, and HK government officials have admitted that lack of public acceptance severely limits the actions they can take.

It's funny you call it 1G instead of 1B. I've never seen people do that. Now I think about it, why is GB not called BB?

Btw, it's 1.5G, not 1G.

Btw, the Chinese government lies about many things but the COVID case numbers weren't lies, at least no lies after March 2020.

> Now I think about it, why is GB not called BB?

Because it doesn’t scale. Giga is the metric prefix for “times billion”.

However, large (and small) numbers don’t end there. What about Quadrillion and Quintillion? What about milli and micro?

OK, so what you mean is, million and mega happen to share the initial, and trillion and tera happen to share too, but billion and giga happen to not share an initial.

Also, the metric prefixes are used cross language, and the ms, bs, and ts aren't the same cross language

Yeah, might’ve been a coincidence

> the Chinese government lies about many things but the COVID case numbers weren't lies, at least no lies after March 2020.

Why would that be?

I would clarify that numbers won't be grossly exaggerated. Because can't disguise compounding numbers for more than a few cycles. Over reporting GDP by 2% consistently for couple decades and real economy would be only 2/3 size as projected. Under report covid for a few days and you have millions of cases instead of hundreds. Also PRC epidemic controls / contact tracing require accurate reporting to even work. The outbreak numbers since March 2020 have been so small that large discrepancies would be hard to hide.

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