It's amazing to me how people resort to these "hurr durr China bad" rhetorics to justify any claim about China. I don't see how the numbers are off besides how they simply couldn't do nearly enough tests by the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Zero covid was successful up until Omicron, evidently. While Christmas markets had to close early in Germany because Delta was so bad, you had huge overcrowded markets in Shanghai, with many people not wearing a mask. If anything, we probably have the most statistically significant numbers about infectiousness and ratio of symptomatic:asymptomatic cases because of the totally over the top testing of every possible contact they did whenever even a single case popped up anywhere.

If anything, with the current draconian lockdown if they had any incentive to lie, they would have to make it look worse than it actually is to justify it.