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?

China provided adequate PPE for their healthcare workers and masks for their general population

Everyone in China has masks anyway to protect themselves from pollution, no one does this in the West. The WHO should have told us to use face masks but they said it wasn’t useful ....

China built two new hospitals in a week I wonder how well it was utilized though? Did they have the software (ie equipment and personnel) as well as the building? We have no idea.

Fed up of all the China bashing. Yes their figures may be dodgy but they've handled this better than the West

Hard to make plans on dodgy figures. I don’t like China bashing but I really don’t like people defending the Chinese government. They don’t deserve your praise, only your condemnation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Taiwan grasped there was human to human transmission in late December and warned the WHO and the Chinese Central Health authority. So why did the official announcement from the WHO happen in late January?

Shambles. Only Taiwan and Singapore has acted in an effective way, likely a hard lesson from SARS and also the knowledge that you cannot trust figures coming out from China, ever. (Just look at their ludicrous GDP figures for one ...)

No one has believed anything the Chinese say for years. They're communists and tend not to be very honest!
Yet when it came to Coronavirus everyone believed every word!
Don't understand why this became the case?

pocketem
I think the Chinese people have suffered far more than their Government is letting on. They have also paid a huge price for the choices made by the CCP. Individual Chinese people have risked their lives to try to get the story out.
This is not about Chinese people but about decisions made by the monolithic Regime that runs China.

To me it's obvious, yes China has "dark figures" the same as all the other countries... nothing surprising here. Remember, a few weeks ago when covid 19 was down played as mild flu? Or only frail and elderly people would die from it? Maybe the Chinese figures are all part of stopping mass hysteria? Keeping people in check? Giving other governments more time to prepare?
And even with recent figures, look at what point testing began and who gets tested... we probably will never know the true extent of this crisis.
All we can do, is following the advice given: minimising contact with other people by staying at home.

I think we can all agree that this is nothing to do with the Chinese people, they are victims in this as much as we are, and if given the opportunity without fear of reprisal I think they would openly join in this conversation and it’s critique of their authorities.

The Chinese government or CCP are the ones many take issue with.

Be very conscious of those defending the regime on here and in the media for that matter too.

Be very conscious of those defending the regime on here and in the media for that matter too

I want to believe they are just misguided or erroneously think criticising China means that the UK become blameless somehow. Useful idiots in other words.

I really don’t want to believe we are infested with wumao.

There is a great article in the Washington Post which is well worth reading. It reports on the continuous operation of cremation services, suggesting a much higher number of deaths, 42,000.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-families-should-be-sweeping-graves-now-but-thousands-still-havent-buried-their-dead/2020/04/03/5a6daa50-7234-11ea-ad9b-254ec99993bc_story.html

China is conducting a propaganda campaigns across social media. The intention is to deflect criticism, promote a heroic narrative about its response and blame America for the virus. As a PP said, one has to be sceptical about posters who parrot the regime's talking points. And wants everyone to stop asking questions.

www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/04/05/china-floods-facebook-instagram-undeclared-coronavirus-propaganda/

@MangoFeverDream There are very few people defending the regime. They are just asking people to think a little critically and not buy into the "sneaky Asian" stereotype.

The Chinese government are obviously not great, no one is denying that.

I think it’s naïve to believe what a communist government tells the world and one shouldn’t feel obliged to be nice about the CCP for fear of being accused of prejudice against Asians. I remember Chernobyl being covered up and the associated Eastern Bloc propaganda nonsense in the 80s. Apply a healthy dose of critical thinking to whatever the CCP are saying.

I find it odd that when you look at the graphs for cases in every other country in the world, they jolt, there are blips. The Chinese case and death graphs are perfect curves. At first I thought it was because of the sheer numbers - but now Italy, US, Spain, UK etc have overtaken them in sheer numbers and there are still clear shifts in gradient etc. I don’t know, maybe it’s due to reporting methods in China - perhaps it’s better integrated and therefore you don’t get the weekend drops etc. But why then no clear shift eg 2 weeks after lockdown, 4 weeks after a new treatment used, 4 weeks after an outbreak in a care home, prison etc as we see in other country data. I’m not going to get into the blame-game that the Daily Mail and Trump are pushing, our own case and death rates are hugely due to failures in testing, tracing and limiting movement. However, I also don’t think the Chinese government have been honest about the scale of their outbreak.

@covetingthepreciousthings, also (and yes I know the effectiveness of masks is disputed) I think the people in Chinese cities are avid mask wearers anyway due to pollution. Might that have helped possibly?

Please don’t forget that these figures are recorded deaths WITH the virus, not deaths FROM. It is not the only cause.. and not usually the main cause.
They are lumping the numbers all together to make it look like everyone who has died FROM it. This is not the case. A contributing factor, but in most cases NOT the cause of death.
A LOT more people have had the virus already, but because of complete lack of testing for the general public, the number of cases reported are lower than they should be, in turn making the mortality rate higher. I’m not saying it isn’t awful.. but the media are not giving a true representation of what is happening.

Of course China has lied. It's a totalitarian regime that doesn't have freedom of speech and uses propaganda and censorship to control the message.

It needed the honest reporting from Italy and Spain for the democratic world to sit up and take notice.

Remember, a few weeks ago when covid 19 was down played as mild flu? Or only frail and elderly people would die from it?

Yes because that's what China was saying. As they arrested whistle-blowers, kept the borders open and unleashed it on the world.

It was only when Italy came up against it that the truth started to come out.

There are very few people defending the regime. They are just asking people to think a little critically and not buy into the "sneaky Asian" stereotype

They should be more careful to separate the government and the people then. You do have posters here praising the Chinese response saying (absurdly) they bought us time, they were transparent, they reported immediately to the WHO, they were victim of essentially a ‘natural disaster’.

None of which are true. Nobody said anything about sneaky Asians, except those trying to paint legitimate criticism as racism. That only serves the CCP government.

and not buy into the "sneaky Asian" stereotype.

I’d like the PP to quote an example of this, from this thread.

They admit the doctor in Wuhan said there were suspicious deaths (plural) by mid December...they shut it down 23 January..so it spread unfettered through a city the size of London for over a month (not even boris telling them to wash their hands!) and they got 3000 deaths total?!

Come on two options..we didn’t shut down too late (because it was a lot quicker than Wuhan..they took approximately six weeks from the first death) or China lied..

so it spread unfettered through a city the size of London for over a month (not even boris telling them to wash their hands!) and they got 3000 deaths total?!

Exactly, and it must have spread unfettered across the rest of China too. Only 56 million were put on lockdown, what about the rest of the billion people who live there?

They are making a big show of reopening Wuhan today, as if that means China is now magically free of coronavirus. Why on earth aren't the media challenging this more instead of just parroting China's PR stunts?

ticklemeelmo
It did spread across the whole of China.
Every province was locked down, not just Hubei, although restrictions in Wuhan were the toughest.

@ShanghaiDiva

This is China's death toll trajectory vs other countries. It's official figures are so obviously falsified when you look at the chart- every other country displays roughly the same pattern.
It's ludicrous to suggest its death rate would be anything close to 3000 when it spread for over a month in a population of a billion.

It's ludicrous to suggest its death rate would be anything close to 3000 when it spread for over a month in a population of a billion

Well said.

My mistake, looking again I think the chart is actually infection rate rather than death rate but the point still stands.

This from the WaPo article is illuminating. China has expelled many foreign journalists, precisely what one expects when the aim is to manage the narrative....

Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes have returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 — or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation from Radio Free Asia, based on Wuhan’s 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800. Wuhan residents say the activities belie the official statistics. “It can’t be right . . . because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” a man identified only by his surname, Zhang, told RFA

ticklemeelmo
I did not make a comment on the veracity or otherwise of the figures and it seems to me they are being challenged by govts and the media.
You said ‘only’ 56 million people were on lockdown, this is not correct: every province was locked down.
Re Wuhan - no doubt this is a fabulous pr exercise, but it is great news for those that went to wuhan to celebrate spring festival and have been stuck inside houses and flats there for nearly three months. Based on what is happening now in China re controlling reinfection from outside, I expect people returning to their own homes will be subject to 14 day isolation or quarantine procedures.