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China

China's Disappearing Data Stokes Fears of Hidden Covid Wave (ft.com) 110

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Edward White in Seoul and Qianer Liu in Hong Kong, reporting for Financial Times: China is under-reporting coronavirus cases and fatalities, obscuring the scale and severity of the health crisis just as the world's most populous country enters its deadliest phase of the pandemic, analysts warn. Official statistics on Friday revealed no new deaths and only 16,363 locally transmitted coronavirus cases in China, less than half the peak caseload reported last month. That is despite a stunning U-turn over the past week to relax President Xi Jinping's heavy-handed pandemic controls, which means the virus is certain to spread. The sweeping changes to Xi's zero-Covid policy allow asymptomatic or mild cases to isolate at home rather than in centralised quarantine, and slashed China's mass testing and contact tracing requirements.

The sudden reversal came weeks after Covid-19 cases hit a record high of more than 40,000 a day, with every region of the country reporting an Omicron outbreak. Despite the official numbers suggesting the caseload had halved, Raymond Yeung, China economist at ANZ bank, said that on-the-ground observations indicated some cities, including Baoding, in the northern province of Hebei, already had "high infection numbers." More big cities, he said, would soon endure similar levels of infections. "Like Hong Kong, the actual infection data will no longer be informative. As the 'official' infection figures decline, the government can eventually claim their successÂagainst the virus," Yeung said.
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China's Disappearing Data Stokes Fears of Hidden Covid Wave More

China's Disappearing Data Stokes Fears of Hidden Covid Wave

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  • You can't have 16,000 Covid cases with nobody dying. Not even with omicron. So somebody is lying.
    • Even worse, we probably won't find out about any new variants coming out of there until they've decimated some place with unfettered public information. Like if there's a COVID-23 that mauls their country, we won't know until things go silent in Iran and then South Africa isolates it once it hits there. Not that advance warning would do too much good with current attitudes in respect to pandemic controls and vaccination.

    • Re:16000 cases (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday December 09, 2022 @01:09PM (#63116958)

      of course it's "complications from covid" that kill people, which could be put under another heading if a place wanted to avoid the c-word. Just like nobody dies from flu, but almost always from the bacterial infections that move into destroyed and weakened tissue.

    • The Chinese Communist Party lying? Surely you jest.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      China is now seeing the first wave, they just have to ride it out and live with a large amount of dead in the first wave.

      There's no other way out of this dilemma for them.

      So I'd expect that China will have to dip down even more before they can recover even if they open up.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Sure you can. Eg. for instance, the age adjusted death rate for the common cold in the US is 2.9 to 5.0 deaths per 1 million population. That's a lot more than 16,000.

      That's where we're headed with Covid. Now that we don't have as many doctors killing patients with Remdesivir as often and respirators are no longer being used - and hospitalizations are down in general - we'll see the death rate drop even further.

  • Get lots of non-immunized or inadequately immunized people sick and see if a new variant pops up.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 0xG ( 712423 )

      Get lots of non-immunized or inadequately immunized people sick and see if a new variant pops up.

      Mod parent up. This is exactly what will happen.

      Now that COVID-19 has come back home, we are going to see lots of new variants.

      On the bright side, it's going to cause no end of trouble fo pooh-bear.

  • Shock horror. In other amazing news, the Pope is Catholic and ursine faecal material is to be found in forested areas.

    • Many places did limited testing, like Japan , but they did report cases known diligently acknowledging understated but directional. Known was hospitalizations and key stat if would overflow. Also, Japan promoted vaccinations from those with good efficacy. Not their own. So cases are relative to severity. This is where under reporting could be an issue.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Actually, the main reliable figure was excess deaths without considering cause. Most places reported that accurately.

  • gives a pretty easy explanation for falling case numbers. No testing, no cases.

    This is pretty much the same in the US. Official case numbers are now meaningless because everyone tests at home and nobody reports their positives to the government. Death statistics might be a wee bit more reliable here than in China, at least in some states.

  • Recently there is lot of rumors that China over counted its population by 100 million to 150 million. So if millions of people die in China for any causes whether it is govt crackdown or Covid or something else, no one would know. It will simply be a drop in the bucket in the accounting error. The actual data is never released and statistical data will now be useless.

    India has problem with actual Covid fatality reporting. But a statistical model based on phone survey showed 3 million excess deaths. You won'

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Phone reporting only shows you that there are people unable to afford phones anymore. It says nothing of deaths.

  • "... just as the world's most populous country enters its deadliest phase of the pandemic, analysts warn. "
    This is only the deadliest phase if you are stupid enough to believe China's former reporting, which as far as I can tell is limited to those deeply wedded to a certain set of beliefs about covid mostly informed by political alignment, and apparently Dr Fauci.

  • There's going to be a lot of talk about Trump, vaccines, anti-vaxxers and all sorts of obnoxious unrelated political commentary here. But none of it's really relevant.

    This is China we're talking about - it's the same China which just took over Hong Kong and crushed all dissent, making the political opposition simply disappear.

    It's the same China which is beating people in the streets and turning their Covid passes "red" - effectively un-personing them - for protesting conditions in Apple's sweatshops. These

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Well, I'm not sure they lied about the origins of Covid, but they sure haven't been accommodating in any research into the matter.

      As for the rest of your assertions, I'm "sort of" willing to believe them, though it would be easy for a source that I trusted to convince me that some of them were gross distortions. And some of them are clearly over-generalizations. E.g. while they are clearly incompetent in some ways, in other ways they don't appear to be so. (But "appear" may be the key word.) OTOH, runni

  • After all the riots, they were inevitably going to change course. Changing the numbers isn't a big deal, they were probably fake to begin with. The chinese themselves won't care. They'll just be happy to finally go back to living their lives as normal.

    • Well, no, because "ignore it and it will go away" is a fantasy. There really isn't a shortcut around the hard work of mass administration of effective vaccines, avoiding transmission, and treatment for all those who do fall ill.

      As recently as a couple weeks ago according to the Chinese government only 2/3 of people over 80 had completed the primary series of Covid vaccination, and less than half (40%) have had a booster. And that's people over 80!

      I haven't looked into why a country that's so strict ab

      • Quarantine: people do not leave the house, you do not get into it to meet them.
        Vaccination: people have to leave the house to meet a doctor/nurse, or they have to enter the house to meet them.

        Vaccinations are usually done in a center, which becomes a hot spot for infection. Drive by solutions might be feasible, but perhaps not for > 80 year olds?

  • In the last week of July 2020 Abbott and DeSantis both flattened the curve for Trump through "data cleaning" and "data delay". They deleted deaths doctors attributed to COVID but which did not have COVID on the death certificate and they stopped using hospital reporting of COVID deaths, instead waiting weeks for death certificates before adding to the tally. This change was very noticeable in the data reporting from these two states, for one they were the only states that had reversals in their cumulative

    • In the last week of July 2020 Abbott and DeSantis both flattened the curve for Trump through "data cleaning" and "data delay". They deleted deaths doctors attributed to COVID but which did not have COVID on the death certificate and they stopped using hospital reporting of COVID deaths, instead waiting weeks for death certificates before adding to the tally. This change was very noticeable in the data reporting from these two states, for one they were the only states that had reversals in their cumulative COVID death curves.

      In the last week of July 2020 Abbott and DeSantis both flattened the curve for Trump through "data cleaning" and "data delay". They deleted deaths doctors attributed to COVID but which did not have COVID on the death certificate and they stopped using hospital reporting of COVID deaths, instead waiting weeks for death certificates before adding to the tally. This change was very noticeable in the data reporting from these two states, for one they were the only states that had reversals in their cumulative COVID death curves.

      So why exactly is this moderated down?

  • China created/released the virus...you think they are going to report accurately??

  • In other shocking developments, kittens nap and water seeks its lowest level.

  • They resisted covid longer than the rest of the world - but now they have surrendered as well. If they they have the same death rates as US and Europe, milliosn will die. That will look bad because they are dying later than they died in the rest of the world.

    I was disappointed that China didn't evolved their anti-covid strategy to be efficient - with surgical use of test / track / isolate, but they stuck with a poorly run brute force approach that couldn't be sustained. Still, sad to see the last

    • Still, sad to see the last of humanity surrender to the virus.
      There are plenty that did not surrender, e.g. Vietnam or New Zealand.

      • I thought New Zealand canceled most of their restrictions. Their death rate is currently in line with the rest of the world. Vietnam had a burst of deaths sept 21 to march 22 where their death rate was similar to the rest of the world but their numbers are low right now, I don't know what restrictions they still have active.

        Note - I trust death numbers more than anything else due to variations in testing, but am well away that they are not all that reliable either .

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