Quote:
Originally Posted by Xist
Yes all kinds of leaders messed up in the U.S. in all kinds of ways and China lied. One does not excuse or invalidate the other.
You guys are just going to ignore the legitimacy of Italy's numbers because it does not fit your agenda?
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I'm actually arguing no one is lying about their stats, including China. It's a matter of testing capability, and the response should not be judged on numbers but rather timeliness and logistics because it was clear "herd immunity" is not an acceptable solution.
You can calculate a pretty tight band which everyone's numbers fall into given the case growth rate in the beginning (no motive to fake at that point), the testing coverage and criteria if coverage is low, and the lockdown measures. As an exercise, let's go through China:
Maybe as a preface, let's address the theories about cell phone subscribers and cremation urns: If 20 million people died, you need near 1 billion true infected, and that's clearly not the case. Users cancelled subscriptions during the lockdown and now they're signing back up. There are 1.6 billion mobile subscribers in China despite only having 1.4 billion people. Cremations stopped during the lockdown and you would expect around 20000 people to have died during the 2 months. China has lists of victim names published for each of the 3000+ officially counted deaths, and hospital capacity is public information.
Let's also address the "cover-up" at the beginning. Doctors first found SARS-like pneumonia late December, and reported it to the WHO on December 31st. The virus was discovered on January 7th and gene sequence was published January 12th. "No evidence of human to human transmission found" on January 15th is NOT a lie, finding scientific evidence is a rigorous process. 5 days later, January 20th, evidence of human to human transmission was found and reported. Not restricting large gatherings in that time was not prudent, but where is the lie?
It's said Wuhan started at 440 hospitalized cases in the hospital on January 23rd. In early February things were not looking good and the Chinese authorities were incentivized to report as bad a situation as possible to get help. That's why you see a jump of 17000 on one day, they added in non-RT-PCR tested (remember, the procedure was originally to do this 2x due to low test accuracy, which limits the number of tests) but CT scan diagnosed pneumonia cases to the count.
Between January 23rd and approximately February 5th? 7th?, temporary hospitals were under construction and being converted, which is when you'd expect some significant number of uncounted and untested deaths. In that time, the patient count was around 10000, and we now know the death rate for patients needing hospitalization comes out to around 20% without treatment. 2000 deaths slipping through in this time is a generous estimate IMO, since the sicker someone is the more likely they are to go to the hospital.
If there were 440 cases and it takes 14 days for most people to show symptoms, and you have a doubling every other day (this is a moderately generous estimate of the rate), that's 7 doublings => 128*440=56320 infected and symptomatic by January 23rd, including recoveries. Then there were subsequent infections within households/buildings, but those are bounded above by the number of original carriers (not everyone infects all the people they live with on average, since the sick ones get isolated) on January 23rd + medical personnel. At most a few thousand of these people left Wuhan, so a few dozen original carriers in large provinces infecting a few hundred more total is consistent.
I didn't check the source but I recall seeing "classified documents" suggest around 43000 asymptomatic people tested in Hubei (mostly in Wuhan obviously). That is consistent with the claims of something like 50% asymptomatic carriers. You can take the previous ~50k, call it 60 after lockdown, and multiply by 2 to count asymptomatic.
So at the end of all that pile of messy numbers, you can guess that at a 3-5% death rate in Wuhan, you're looking at something like 100k true cases vs 50k reported (aka tested while still infected and survived) and 3000-4000 deaths instead of the 2000 reported (aka tested or CT scanned before death).
If you believe the people who think 40k people died, you would need around 1 million infected. Think about that for a second. Strict quarantine at 440 sick, 1 million infected. NYC did a soft shut down with 1100 hospitalized, so NYC would have to have over 1 million infected too. Think about the implications of that.
I'm a betting man. I would bet that the true total number of infected in China is over 120k at 4:1 odds, over 150k at 1:1 odds, and under 250k at 2:1 odds. Subtract the 80k reported, and you get IMO an extremely reasonable number of missed cases that recovered without a test. I expect antibody testing to turn up somewhere around 100k more.
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