In fact, based on excess mortality calculations, The Economist estimates that the true number of Covid deaths in China is not 4,636 – but something like 1.7 million."
"Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2022/01/02/beijin...
The Economist trained a black box machine learning algorithm on data from a bunch of countries that let the virus rip, and then blindly applied the resulting model to China. Garbage in, garbage out.
From April 2020 through the end of 2021, people in China were out and about, living their lives almost as normal. Nobody knew anyone who was getting sick, much less dying. The hospitals weren't overflowing. Almost nowhere was under lockdown. During this time, the Economist's model spits out a death toll of over a million.
As I said, total nonsense. Anyone who works with ML models and statistics can tell you that when you train a black box and it produces silly output, your model is junk. You don't use your model's output to make crazy claims like, "1.7 million Chinese people died, but nobody (including nobody in China) noticed."
One final thing: When it comes to China, a lot of people in the West are living in absolute fantasy land. Disbelief/denial that cases in China have been essentially zero for most of the last two years or claims that a million Chinese people have died are examples of this. As someone who actually knows what's happening in the country, it's quite frustrating.
"Amid a massive surge in COVID-19 cases in China, Beijing is trying to hide the real death toll by masking the cause of death. Citing Financial Times, Taiwan News reported that if someone dies after contracting COVID-19 but had, for example, cancer, heart disease, or diabetes at the time, Chinese hospitals would not classify the death as resulting from COVID-19, but as a chronic illness instead. The faulty methodology was confirmed by Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at Hong Kong University."
"The numbers are not accurate, but Shanghai hospitals are not necessarily doing this on purpose. From the start, China had this method of recording deaths," he added."
https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/ch...
Second, all these stories about China supposedly concealing deaths in the Shanghai outbreak came out just a few weeks after cases began to rise. Back then, there were only a handful of reported deaths. A few weeks later, there have been over 500 deaths (roughly in line with what one would expect, given the number of infections), and these claims of concealing deaths look pretty silly. Deaths always lag cases, and there can also be reporting delays.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
When a black box ML model spits out a highly surprising answer that contradicts everything that is known, your response should be, "Why should I believe this model?"
They're citing a machine learning model that tries to correlate various other measures (like GDP/capita, unemployment, etc.) with mortality in some countries, and then extrapolates to every country. That model spits out ridiculous numbers for China. A normal statistician would look at that and say, "This model doesn't generalize well," not, "1.7 million people died without leaving a trace."
The best actual measurement of excess mortality in China was published in the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal).[0] It found that in the initial outbreak in early 2020, there were just under 5,000 excess pneumonia deaths. Almost all of them were in Wuhan itself. In most of China, there were actually negative excess deaths, because the lockdowns reduced flu and car crash deaths.
China has 4x the number of people living there as the US. Back in November 2020, approximately 0.08% of all Americans had already died of Covid. That's about 0.01% of America's population dying a month for the first 8 months. And yet if you asked most people in the US if they actually knew of someone who got sick and went to the hospital with Covid, let alone die from it, the overwhelming response would have been no. Most of people's understanding of the toll of the virus was through the media and second hand reports, which is why Covid denialism was able to flourish. And look at case rates today. Thanks to vaccines and immunity, death rates are low, but recent CDC reports have official Covid cases for this week being at the same level as they were in November 2020, with the true number being almost certainly far higher due to the availability of home testing now. And yet American society has largely returned to business as usual, and most people don't know anyone with an active infection right now.
Now look at China. A total of 1.7 million Chinese people dying through then end of 2021 would only amount to 0.12% of Chinese people dying, but over the course of 24 months, which is about 0.05% of the population dying per month over the course of the pandemic. If most Americans were still mostly only encountering Covid through the media as late as November 2020, then I imagine it would be pretty easy to feel like things are under control in China when the death rate is half that, combined with strict government control of media, hospitals, and the internet.
My friends in China on the other hand know no one who has had covid, let alone someone who went to the hospital or died. That could maybe be media control, but I don't buy it. They tried that in Wuhan and it miserable failed, why would it suddenly work now?
And how do you explain they didn't have mass lockdowns for 2 years and now they are back? These lockdowns are super unpopular and wreck the economy so I don't see why they would do it unless really necessary.
Yes, but that is the entirety of the pandemic, including the Omicron wave. Prior to Omicron (i.e. Winter 2021), it was estimated only about 30% of Americans had contracted Covid. Just in the last 6 months it has increased to over 60%. But in my original comment, I specifically called out the time frame from the beginning of the pandemic to November 2020 in the US. The total number of Americans to have contracted covid by that point was actually quite small, and very few people personally knew anyone, or at most one or two people, who had actually had the disease. It was still largely something people heard about through the news, and saw secondary effects of like mask mandates, rather than something they personally had experienced by that point.
Now take that same death rate, halve it, and spread it not over 6 months, but 24, and yes, it would be very easy for things to feel like business as usual, even if 1.7 million individuals in China had died from the disease. The point isn't that China has had it just as bad as the rest of the us. The point is that even if they have faired remarkably well comparatively, 1.7 million deaths is entirely plausible in a country with 1.4 billion people and some of the strongest state controls over individuals on the planet.
> And how do you explain they didn't have mass lockdowns for 2 years and now they are back?
The reason they are back to extreme lockdowns is Omicron. Just look at the peaks elsewhere in the world compared to what was considered "bad" waves previously. It makes them look like blips. It's so contagious that even China cannot contain the spread without extreme measures.
If 30% of Americans had been infected by November 2020, then most people would know many people who had contracted CoVID-19. Unless you only know 2 people (plus yourself - that makes 3), chances are that you know someone who was infected before November 2020. Based on my personal experience, that's true. I personally know many Americans who got CoVID-19 before November 2020. I don't know a single person in China who got CoVID-19 in that timeframe (or to this day).
> it would be very easy for things to feel like business as usual, even if 1.7 million individuals in China had died from the disease
No, it would not feel at all like business as usual. First of all, a death toll of 1.7 million deaths implies around 450 million infections, or about 30% of the Chinese population. As we know from everywhere around the world, that would have meant stressed hospitals (and given how few ICU beds China has, it would have been much more stressed than the US).
Because Chinese cities were almost completely open at this time, with very few restrictions on public gatherings, restaurants, etc., there would have been extremely sharp epidemic waves that would have swept through Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and all the other major cities. Everyone would know. Everyone would have friends, family members, colleagues, etc. who had gotten infected. Every doctor and nurse in the country would have seen countless CoVID-19 patients.
Simply put, none of this is the case.
If you think it's plausible, you have a fantasy view of China. We're not talking about Mars here. We're talking about a country of 1.4 billion people, with tens of millions of its citizens living abroad, with a million expats living inside its borders, with many millions of people who use VPNs. And even with internet censorship in China, it's impossible to keep major events like a large CoVID-19 outbreak secret. Just think of all the stories from the Shanghai lockdown that have spread around the world, despite internet censorship.
None of the people I know in China has gotten CoVID-19. They don't even personally know anyone who's gotten CoVID-19. The closest I've gotten is that I know one person in China who has a family member who was a close contact of an infected person. The family member had to quarantine at home for one week and get tested regularly, but didn't end up getting infected.
But people with no connection at all to China believe it's somehow plausible that the virus has rampaged through the population and killed 1.7 million people, without so much as a peep getting out.
Also what do you count the people who die from these lockdowns as, meta-covid deaths?
The bigger problem though is that a significant proportion of elderly people remain unvaccinated. Look what happened in Hong Kong to see a prediction of what will happen if Covid gets loose in mainland China without a more substantial vaccine drive.
I would not be surprised if this was true, but is there any independent evidence of that?
> The bigger problem though is that a significant proportion of elderly people remain unvaccinated.
Yes -- in part because of what I mentioned in the previous comment.
You can find plenty of research about this if you spend a couple minutes searching. E.g. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22272769v... https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2022/05/03/postgradmedj-20... Disclaimer: I have not deeply investigated these papers.
Pfizer has outperformed Sinovac, but it still provided protection.