No sane person believes the numbers coming out of China. As countries start testing more for the virus the numbers will continue to grow. Very easy for a countries line to flat line if you don't test for it.
But I know people in the region I work with on a daily basis and by their account there are no masses of people dying everywhere and some of restrictions on movement were lifted.
If the infected population grew exponentially China would be flooded with bodies long ago but that does not seem to be what is happening.
China might not be believable in many things but it is difficult to hide millions of people sick or dying.
Points taken. The CCP controls all media, the story, and the narrative. I personally don't see the infected nor the deaths in the US, but this information is disseminated through via media who gets there data from the CDC and other government agencies. The CCP hide the details about the outbreak for some time and only got out via individuals who broke the news at severe fear of being punished by the CCP.
I do work with people in China, who doesn't these days, right? They report the same thing I see which is I don't see the infected or deaths directly, unless working in health care. My industry is tech so the individuals that I work with will not have first hand accounts. They only know what the CCP informs the public and we all know it is a well formulated narrative.
I believe we will never know the true depths until the CCP is finally overthrown and details are released after that time.
I find this focus on CCP not healthy for the learning process. Certainly something to take into account but your preoccupation with it seems to be excessive.
There seems to be no reason currently to disbelieve Chinese numbers. They are encumbered by unknown, possibly very significant measurement errors, for sure, but so are european or american ones.
Due to nature of exponential growth I think it is unrealistic to believe that the virus grows rampant. All signals point to Chinese economy coming back from the nap and I find it difficult to believe that would be happening if internally Chinese state was still struggling to get the virus under control.
Just use Occam's razor. The simplest explanation, given no facts to point otherwise, is that Chinese state used its power and control over population to actually successfully push back the spread of the virus.
Check the reports coming from Italy/Spain that the Chinese test kits they've received are only 30% accurate. Testing 10 known infected the kits reports 3 are infected, and 7 as not.
So if China is using similar kits, which is what is supposedly happening, they could have almost 3x the cases they are reporting.
Or, they are shipping inaccurate tests to rest of world to "help"
It does not matter much whether the tests are 30% accurate. See... this is exponential growth. Due to its nature it will overrun any linear factors in a short time.
What if the reported Chinese numbers are only 30% of reality compared to US numbers? If you understood the nature of exponential growth you would know it will take just about 4 days for US to have three times the numbers China has.
It currently only takes US about 8 days to increase the number of cases tenfold (see here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) which means 4 days to get 3 times increase.
What really matters is to get people to stop moving around and spreading the virus.
