China must have majorly downplayed their figures, right?

[Louise000000]

We are now over 5,000 deaths and China just over 3,000. This isn't even possible is it, how have they managed to cover up their true numbers here?

I find it massively hard to believe that their new infections figures are so low. And entirely down to people 'importing' the virus too apprently..

I believe that China have deliberately covered up how serious this was.

The WHO have been complicit in promoting this lie.

There needs to be serious questions about the WHO and the role that they have played in the spreading of this virus.

The UK and other European countries are not identifying all cases \ deaths but they are clearly stating how they get to the numbers.

Whilst it may be that they are wrong at the moment, the same is true for other countries.

Long term the actual numbers will be more visible

But yes I believe China has lied and they still continue to do so.

As the border is now closed ‘imported’ infections should now drop, although Chinese citizens can obviously exit and reenter the country.
Flights in and out of China have also been drastically reduced.
The Chinese firmly believe new cases are mostly imported and have taken huge measures to control this: 14 day mandatory quarantine with twice daily temp checking and at least two tests.

Some of us either live in China or have friends and family there, so we do have some idea of what's going on.

(Same with Singapore, Taiwan, etc)

I'll add Hong Kong to the list of places that seem to have managed the outbreak relatively well. I don't think British citizens would be likely to accept the sort of electronic tracing that's been used in many of the Asian countries that have done a ton of contact tracing and tracing of people's movements, given the amount of pushback against the lockdown that has been imposed.

China’s lockdown wasn’t like our lockdown.
Some Chinese students take/took a 15 minute stroll around the block once a week or once a fortnight. Not a one hour run every day through crowded parks as many do here.
Deaths in Wuhan/Hubei are very likely severely underreported - as they were caught unawares and initially the hospitals etc couldn’t cope.
However that is very unlikely to be the case in other provinces. Once they identified the outbreak in Wuhan they didn’t mess around like we did - remember we had British government ministers, including the PM, attending massive sports fixtures as recently as 7th March. “No need to panic, timing is everything, business as normal” was our mantra in the early crucial weeks.

Our death figures aren't right. If you did at home from covid it lmost certainly won't be in the figures as you won't have had a test.

@Ticklemeelmo
My wife and myself have more than a couple of thousand contacts in China. None of them have died and virtually none of them even know anyone who tested positive. Did more than 2500 people die in Wuhan/Hubei? Sure, as Wuhan was caught unawares and it was utter chaos for a few weeks in hospital there (like Italy for example). So certainly you could reasonably double or treble the number of deaths in Wuhan as people were tragically unable to get hospital beds.
But talk of some grand conspiracy is nonsense. The national lockdown was early, severe and almost impeccably observed (voluntarily in 99.9% of cases).

Germany are testing every man woman and dog but not declaring the death if there is underlying health issues

I keep seeing this piece of propaganda trotted out. Where is your source for it being based in fact?

Its entirely at odds with what I'm being told by people living and working there (including working in the health sector). People tesing positive for Covid and ill with symptoms of Covid are registered as Covid deaths.

Germany has been conducting extensive testing and increasing social isolation since early on. We wasted the early weeks blithering about herd immunity (which only really applies when you have a vaccine) and we are still not testing even high priority people. I would expect Germany to keep their death rate lower in the circumstances.

Can someone explain to me how it would help us if we had definitive proof that China had falsified its figures? What would we do differently if we knew that there were five times as many deaths as reported (for example)?

Nothing really. The best model to follow so far seems to be South Korea but it's too late to that here, plus as I mentioned I feel like Brits would balk at the level of tracing of people's movements involved.

Our figures are dodgy as hell. Refusing to test anyone apart from hospital inpatients until last week so missing huge numbers if cases. Many areas with an informal ban on care home residents being admitted to hospital so they die without ever being tested. According to our official figures only 135 people have recovered from coronavirus in this country

It's a joke to complain about other countries fiddling their figures when ours are so blatantly false. Plus China went into lockdown early, whereas our government were telling us just last month that all we needed to do was wash our hands and carry on our lives as normal.

PuzzledObserver
If the figures coming out of China had been anywhere near the figures we are seeing in Europe people would have taken this more seriously much sooner.

I don’t want to sound mean about China because the Chinese people truly are remarkable individuals and I admire them a lot.
But the reality of a strict communist regime, however forward thinking it may be in terms of economic growth and allowing (in the looser sense of the word) enterprise is that it wants and needs to project the perfect image at the cost of human dignity, libery and life.
To put it bluntly, they have enough population to afford to loose a few if it means that international trade will not stagnate for too long. That’s what it comes down to.
So the figures would have been altered and misrepresented even to WHO officials. They probably sat on this problem for much longer than we know but they would have tried their hardest to stem the flow of the spread alongside denial in order to not create panic and to maintain an active working environment. Until it got too much and it got out of the country.
They’d have too scientists and strategists but even they would only know half of the story.
There would have been human loss in the process of containing the spread within those who did the practical stuff, overtime, stress etc.
Coercion for implementing extreme lockdown rules. As in a martial law but under the guise of protecting the population. The trouble is, that’s what worked. We will not know the full extent of suffering at human level there and that’s not just deaths caused by the virus.
But to be fair to China, they did share some very useful research as early as they could and that proved to be of high quality (which doesn’t surprise me) and very useful to the world. So they’ve been as truthful as it can benefit them. No more, no less.
Ultimately China wants (not sure if it needs to right now) to keep trading with the world. And we are all using their products. China turns a very big wheel in the world economic context in terms of manufacturing, supply of prime matter and it’s an essential financial lever in, basically, making the world go around.

puzzled it probably doesn't help now
But early on it seemed that the virus really wasn't that serious. And that there was little evidence of Human to Human transmission.

The WHO backed China.

Who knows if governments would have reacted differently but they have been on the back foot since then.

I imagine when it became clear that Italy had widespread infection, it was already rife here.

I still believe that many countries will go for herd immunity, they have not been stupid enough to mention it though.

UK is already on it's way to a significant percentage of population infected. Many other european countries too.

I'm pretty sure I had this virus in early in february; My symptoms were initially experienced as a pain and itching in the eyes, followed by a headache, blocked nose and thick mucus, with coughing (as I'm usually sensitive to anything in my throat), I then lost my voice due to a lot of mucus build-up, -took all the advice of friends including steaming my head and throat over a bowl of hotter covered by a towel regularly -I avoid medicines and did not take any pain killers, but had regularly light steam vegetable meals. I was very tired for over a period of a week but felt fine after 2 weeks; My 18- year old son was fine during the period but developed a cough with mucus, the day before schools were closed, this subsided after a week of both of us isolating....

I wouldn’t be surprised if the quality of information filtering up to the central CCP was initially massaged by local officials not wanting to highlight a problem. I’m not sure that “don’t shoot the messenger” applies to the CCP. Also would a problem in your region be seen as incompetence and a loss of face.

Flat out lying!!!

There would definitely have been an element of provinces wanting to show they had it all under control.
I live in Jiangsu and there are have been 651 cases and no deaths In a population of about 80 million.

I will never buy anything made in China again. why not? And how would you do that. Components or materials used to make most items do have Chinese provenance. Items are assembled there as well. I don’t mean the silly cute pencil case every kids has. I mean electronics, you laptop, the plastic cover inside your engine, medical treatment raw ingredients, the pigment in the paint in your living room or local health centre, the stitching on your jeans, the shoelaces on your American made walking boots, a whole lots of stuff you simply cannot elect to remove from your life.
The Chines people are hardworking and have amazing values. The regime they live under is not a reflection of each individual Chinese person. You only need to look at their very long rich history to realise they are a worthy partner. That’s the problem. As an outsider you punish the country meaning to punish the regime but it will be the people who will suffer and be out of jobs.
Anyway, the peak will subside at some point, there’s a limit to growth, there’s a limit to resources (natural and human) and hopefully climate and welfare concerns will be addressed, gradually. Not sure if in our lifetime but I wish it was.

Tiger every winter a range of viruses and bugs, including other Corona viruses, circulate. You may well have had a virus but it is unlikely it was Covid. I am still coughing following a cold virus that gave me a temperature and stuff up sinuses in January but I do not think it was Covid - just a standard cold virus. As I understand it you do not get mucus with Covid,

there’s a school of thought (can’t remember which research university) that believes we’ve had it since late December/January.

So it’s been here and spreading from late December to mid-March with relativity little impact, but people only started becoming critically ill in large numbers and dying over the past fortnight or so. Ok then

@Tigerzmum

You do realise there are many other cold viruses circulating over winter....Seems like you probably just had one of those.

Derbygerbil, This virus was very much unlike those ever experienced on the years before; The lethargy that accompanied the attack made me feel as though I had literally been drugged, and the copious mucus became painfully embarrassing. It was only after covid -19 had become well known in the UK, that I linked my symptoms to the covid -19. ps There were other symptoms too, but the 2 mentioned above were the most bothersome.

I am not a medical expert , but from what I have been reading, its the mucus which is the ultimate killer by blocking up the lungs;