Jim Geraghty is skeptical of China's alleged success against COVID-19:
To hear China tell it, they have barely had any cases of infection from the hyper-contagious Omicron variant. The South China Morning Post wrote yesterday, “so far China has reported nine Covid-19 cases caused by the Omicron variant, including two who were infected by a man returning from Canada.”
....The Chinese official health statistics are insanely implausible. Even if we want to give Chinese policies of city-wide lockdowns and quarantining people by welding apartment doors shut the broadest possible benefit of the doubt, it’s simply not plausible that a virus that has proven wildly contagious in every other country suddenly became shy and socially-awkward once it entered the jurisdiction of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yeah, I have the same skepticism. I mean, take a look at the reported case rate for China and its closest neighbors:
China's officially reported case rate is 37x lower than Myanmar's, and that's the closest comparison. Their case rate is 1600x lower than Vietnam's.
There's nothing new about this. On a cumulative basis, China's case rate is 250x lower than Vietnam's and 450x lower than Thailand's.
I dunno. This all just seems so implausible.
"nine Covid-19 cases caused by the Omicron variant, including two who were infected by a man returning from Canada.”
International travel is the main disease vector and has been for two years.
"International travel is the main disease vector and has been for two years."
I am afraid this is no more plausible than Chinese statistics.
Imagine there was no air travel possible. How would it spread all over the world…. In a few weeks? Delta came from India. How did it get here so fast? Same with omicron. I understand no one wants to admit it or even do anything about it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the case. Good luck.
Agreed. We need to reduce international travel across the board.
There's a difference between the statements "air travel bans are ineffective" (true) and "air travel hasn't been a primary covid vector" (false).
If Jim Geraghty and other right-wing pundits are so concerned about Covid denialism they can start with their own readers and in some cases themselves.
Right wing???? Please, political shills does not require dialectical mumbling.
Oh fffs, the Chinese are almost certainly lying about their case counts, as they have from the beginning.
They're either lying, or the crazies are right and this is some sort of Chinese bioweapon that miraculously doesn't affect Chinese people.
I'm going to go with lying.
OR everyone's pet theories for what results in high covid infection rates are essentially political arguments, immune to facts.
TIME AFTER TIME we have see people loudly crow about some covid statistic that proves they were right all along -- only to have the picture change a month, six month, a year later. Right now we are seeing this happen before our eyes as San Francisco, previously almost smug in their low rates, spikes; and Blue NYC is doing a lot worse than, say, Red Atlanta.
I do know from personal experience that the Myanmar experience has been a lot less bad than one might have expected (and a lot better than the US experience). Now you can make any excuses you want for this, in particular you can claim bad stats, but lived experience in the sense of "knowing people who died, who got sick and recovered, and who didn't get sick" suggests that Myanmar was just much less susceptible than the US, and that those who did get sick just weren't especially sick, mostly just suffering from nasty flu symptoms and anosmia.
- All the marginally healthy people in Myanmar died years ago from TB, hunger, etc, so the population was intrinsically stronger than the US population?
- Very few fat people?
- "Asian" genes?
- Previous (unknown) exposure to similar'ish viruses just floating around Asia?
Who knows... And that's the point. WHO KNOWS!?!
We still simply do not know, not really. One theory after another has been tested and proved wanting.
But insisting that the narrative must flow a certain way because of your political convictions hasn't work for the past two years of the pandemic; it's not going to start working now.
How to lie with statistics. They must have studied their Huff.
China initiates biggest lockdown since Wuhan,
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/xian-china-covid-lockdown-wuhan-b1981322.html
Hard to believe it isn't Omicron.
Easy to say China is lying. How about Japan? Are they lying too?
Japan has reported ~14,000 case /million people verus 71cases/ millioon for China and 147 deaths per million for Japan verus 3 death per million for Cina so Japan may be slightly under reporting but Cina is jsut lying.
Unless the Chinese actually did deliberately create this virus as a weapon and specifically designed it to not be as effective for the specific genetic makeup of Chinese peoples ( except the uhguyrs and Tibetans which they would like to kill) , which would also explain a lower death rate among genetically similar people like Japanese. Or the Chinese created it but have a secret antidote or vaccine that they are not sharing.
Now , while I am not saying this is likely ( for one Chinese American death rates lower but not that much) , why are the Chinese lying in a way that , if we actually believed them, would convince us that they effectively declared war.
It is as if someone accidentally caused the death of someone through negligence. And then lies to cover that up in a way that could only mean they murdered them..
The Chines are lying because it is what they do and what they can get away with due to censure and mind control. They don't really care much when us strangers don't believe them (though they complain anyway).
OR there are aspects to Asian biology that are intrinsically stronger against the virus because of a long co-history living with some (not yet identified) similar virus?
We certainly know this sort of this exists, and happened in the past:
https://www.livescience.com/43063-black-death-roma-evolution.html
And of course the version everyone should know is the extraordinarily higher mortality caused by European diseases hitting the Americas (though the facts of that experience tend to be drowned out by people more interested is talking "blame" than talking biology).
And the reverse happened in Africa -- the statistics for whites in West Africa in the 1700..1800s were something like 90% death rate during a stay of a few years.
"This all just seems so implausible."
Uh, it's a lie. China lies. Xi lies. The CCP lies. About everything. Plausibility is not anything absolute dictators care about.
I was traveling to Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak and I will tell you they do not eff around when it comes to wearing masks.
They put them on for SARS and they put them on at the onset of Covid.
I remember talking to my very good friend in Hong Kong about summer of 2020. He was adamant that anyone seen out without a mask was catching major scorn. And it was rare to see anyone maskless.
Oh, and they cleaned up the trash.
Having lived in Malaysia for three years and travelling thoughout the region, I can agree that mask warning is much more common everywhere in East Asia than Europe of North America but that doesn't explain the difference between China and it's closest neighbours. What I don't understand is why the Chinnese government is lying so blatantly when I'm sure their strong-arm methods are working quite well. If the true is that they are doing as well as Japan, that is still better than almost all of their ineightbours and much better than the US or European countries.I guess that is not good enough for Xi.
"If you relinquish most control to us (CCP) then we will protect you and give you an increasing standard of living." Not keeping COVID quashed threatens that.
Omicron ain't worth much. It's weak and irrelevant. Abolishing covid protocols is next
The powers that be in China have a narrative, which must be maintained…
Taiwan is a neighbor of China.We have had 28 cases of Omicron in total. Covid cases, cumulative: 16,890 Deaths: 850.
The government here does not lie about the number of cases. They are extremely reactive to any reported cases and constantly take visible measures and exhort (even nag) the population.
Taiwan is an island. And , unlike the rest of the world, assumed China was lying about covid from the start and took measures and travel restrictions to stop it getting there while everyone was taking china's word initially that it was not even transmissible human to human.
Therfore Taiwan's numbers are still conceivable, just like new Zealand. But still expect eventually omicron hits and spreads.
But covid started in China. So it was spreading before the govt could react . And it is a large country with less controllable travel from other countries. So just not conceivable that their cases are so low, outside of the nefarious possibilities I mentioned.
Plus, there are other indicators of a much higher death toll you can infer from other statistics. Some have estimated 10 million excess deaths although that seems real high. Just the obvious crush on things like crematoriums make it obvious there had to be more deaths.
I would think that China is lying but also knows that anyone who can think knows it is lying. And so the point is not actually to come up with a believable lie that just might be believable. Sometimes, for an authoritarian regime, the outrageous unbelievable lie is the point . When all the citizens are intimidated into accepting it as the truth , at least outwardly, it corrupts respect for actual truth and makes truth just what govt says. And even better if they can intimate people in other countries to accept an obvious falsehood. Or get some to defend it for ideological reasons.
The obvious nature of china's lie might be intended
PRC official stats don't include asymptomatic cases.
That said, was New Zealand also lying during the long stretch of 2020 and 2021 when it had substantially eliminated regular community spread? The difference between New Zealand China is the former wasn't quite as thorough, and so its early, tremendous success (eventually) began to dissipate. And so so it gave up its zero tolerance policy. (Wisely so in my view because it's pretty unlikely it would have be able to return to its previous status).
It's not impossible to drastically reduce community spread of the coronavirus. Most countries simply aren't willing or able to implement Chinese methods, successful implementation of which requires that virtually every resident of the country live in a controlled access environment. (Pretty much all 1.4 billion residents of the PRC — even in rural areas— live in the equivalent of a 24/7 guarded gated community, so their comings and goings, as well as their testing and vaccination status, can be tracked).
I live in the capital, so it's possible I'm getting an inaccurate view of the big picture. But my take is, yes, I'd be skeptical of the statistics coming out of China if they were coming out of a country that didn't operate under one party rule and universal, controlled residency. But China does operate under such a system, and its low (but by no means absent) levels of covid seem plausible, and I'm not hearing any rumors of huge flare-ups in the provinces.*
*The regime possesses a monopoly on news, of course, but, as in all authoritarian societies, the place is rife with gossip and rumors. If anything, my status as a foreigner generally means I'm more, not less, trusted as a target of anti-regime bitching. I really doubt my ears wouldn't have heard of massive but unreported covid flare-ups were they occurring in reality.
Weren't we hearing about all manner of things involving high utilization of funeral homes/crematoria/etc at the beginning?
Weren't we hearing about all manner of things involving high utilization of funeral homes/crematoria/etc at the beginning?
I haven't heard that, but who knows? And I absolutely do think their numbers from the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020 — especially death figures — are probably highly inaccurate (that is, many more people died than the official statistics indicate). That said, I believe the evidence suggests they really did largely manage to bring their domestic pandemic under control: that part isn't a mirage from what I can tell. Also, though, we shouldn't exaggerate what is meant by "under control": the PRC has admitted to multiple outbreaks and rolling lockdowns, so, not even official sources are claiming the country is covid-free (or really, anything close to that).
China lied how many died at the beginning. So do most countries. India lied during the Delta wave. Everyone lies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/world/asia/hong-kong-stand-news-arrest.html
The Chinese government is evil, but that government is made of of several hundred million people. So the people in that picture arresting that guy are evil. What percentage of Chinese people are evil? Don’t have a clue. All of them. Until they demonstrate otherwise, all of them.
Uh, they seriously lock down. They also do stuff like shoot peoples dogs.
I am envious. Everyone has their issue that supercedes morals. Disease is mine.
Emperor Xi has decreed China to be free from the Coronavirus and therefore it is. The Mantle of Heaven is worn lightly by so great and wise a Leader!
Well, if you confine 13 million people to their home as a reaction to a handful or so of cases, then of course you get results regarding virus spread. But what other adverse health effects do you get? They look at one (1) aspect of health and ignore everything else.
13 million people???? Nope.
Yes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/25/chinese-city-of-xian-sees-covid-case-rise-as-it-enters-third-day-of-lockdown
A government that values the lives of its population over the production of surpluses to ensure returns on capital investments is implausible to the subjects of American imperialism.
Even the lockdown is half assed. It's not really a lockdown. This board is full of morons.
Compare China to here (NZ)
Until Delta managed to get in we had 5 deaths per million and not internal transmission
And Kiwis are an ornery lot - nowhere near as "Social minded" as the Chinese
Even after Delta got in we have 9 deaths per million and about 7 new cases per million
China - with a much more cooperative society is about 3 deaths per million
I do not find that as unbelievable as some people do