Corona Virus And Playoff Games

[ugarte]

Every government is lying to look better. Here, there is a simultaneous dance where the Administration wants to make sure people take it seriously but not so seriously that they get mad at the government for waiting so long to take it seriously. We're intentionally undercounting our COVID-19 cases by under-testing and attributing anything that isn't a confirmed-by-test illness or death as a coronavirus case to something else. It's straight up juking the stats. Our numbers would look worse if we were being honest and it's pretty clear that China has been bullshitting for a while too. Japan lied about their numbers until it was clear that the Tokyo games couldn't go forward and then they started being a bit more honest. As bad as Italy is, it sounds like they avoid counting COVID cases too, so their numbers could be even worse.

South Korea and maybe Germany appear to be the only countries being genuinely honest about their methods and successes.

this is basically a repeat of a twitter thread here, and someone replied with evidence that Italy is juking the stats https://twitter.com/Ugarles/status/1246128308573614084

[Swampy]

Thanks everyone. These are very helpful, knowledgeable posts.

But getting back to the simple calculations I reported, they're pretty damning. We have 4.25% of the world's population, 25% of the infections, and 12.5% of the deaths. What amazes me is that even the allegedly anti-Trump media (e.g., MSNBC) does not highlight such comparisons.

Ugarte, some smart masters student will decompose U.S. death statistics to figure out the gap. Use historical data to estimate a "normal" death rate. Attribute the entire increment to a higher rate to COVID-19. Subtract the "official" COVID death rate from it, and the residual is a combination of the juking and collateral damage (i.e., deaths from other causes but attributable to COVID; e.g., a heart attack patient who was never treated because there was no room at the hospital).

Oh, and we can adjust for China, or any other country, screwing around with the numbers by simply removing the China data from the world totals and recalculating.

[cu155]

The gaslight dujour here is to compare us with China and then claim China is cooking the books. I suspect even if we took China out of the world totals and compared us to what's left, we'd still look awful. But besides your direct observations, do you have any sense of whether China is indeed cooking the books on the total numbers infected and dead from the disease, either for China as a whole or for individual cities like Shanghai?

Swampy, I want to be clear my comments in my original post were definitely not meant in any way to deflect from the shamefully poor response of our Federal government and of many state governments.  I'm merely trying to provide some contrast in terms of what is being done on the ground here versus the US approach.  FWIW I've had Fox news anchors call me a 'panda hugger' so it's not that I'm blindly anti China or pro USA.

To answer your questions, yes I do have some direct understanding of what is happening here.  I know two hospital heads, one in Shanghai and one in Beijing who have told me privately that they are seeing a significant number of patients that are local transmission cases, not returning foreigners or Chinese nationals who are bringing the disease back.  To my understanding the numbers are significant but not to crisis level at this time.  I also know that an apartment complex (one complex might be home to 5000 plus people) in my district in China was recently re-quarantined due to positive tests.  However, those new positives have not been applied to my district's overall case numbers which have been kept at 6 for the past 2 months.  I also personally know more than 6 people who have tested positive so can say with some confidence that they are being cagey about the numbers.

The reality of the situation is that China did move fairly quickly but that a lot of what they are doing is window dressing and not completely effective.  However, their approach is still more than we are seeing in the US. But as with anything the government does in China optics are important.  

The Chinese government's overriding directive is always to maintain social stability.  They remember the Cultural Revolution and do not want to go back to that.  What I suspect is happening is that they are keeping numbers artificially low for a few reasons.  
1) They are worried about the economy and are hoping that they can get people back to work while at the same time keeping just enough controls in place to manage new cases.  
2) They are hoping that in doing this the number of new cases will be low enough that they can continue to under report numbers and keep the situation controlled until there is a vaccine.  
3) They want to be able to show China as a model of excellence in fighting the pandemic both for a domestic audience who were quite critical of the government when this first got bad, as well as to a global audience to show China as an alternative to the US.

China just had a national day of mourning for victims of the 'war' yesterday.  They played air raid sirens in all cities for ten minutes, and everyone driving stopped to honk their horns in solidarity.  They also played several documentaries from Wuhan.  What was interesting was how they approached the political angle.  The central message was effectively that the leaders of Wuhan let down the people and left the people to fend for themselves and so the people came together as one to care for each other, survive and sacrifice.  This is the central government's playbook in situations like this.  Blame the local government, blame the corrupt head of the high speed train network etc. (rightly or wrongly), then inject emotional stories about how the people and nation rallied together to help each other.

I don't know if we'll ever get totally accurate numbers if/when this whole situation resolves but I do hope that the US and China and other nations take a long hard look at what failed and what did work and implement best practices to prevent this in future.

[profudge]

Check out the Washington Post article:  Denial and Dysfunction plagued US Government as coronavirus raged ...  for a good press overview of things not going so well.

[osorojo]

Darwin was right.

[Trotsky]

An excellent lesson on COVID-19 by a very effective teacher.