this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
803 readers
14 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This stat is bunk. They just stopped testing after opening up.
I've seen estimates of ~1 million deaths, which is proportionally still very low to be absolutely fair to them.
Excess death stats, right?
What you have to remember is that all cause mortality from air borne respiratory disease went down because of those zero COVID policies. Masking and staying home and aggressive testing prevents everything else from killing people too, many of those excess deaths can be attributed to other less deadly infections that had also been suppressed by China efforts. Immunity debt might play a role as well, as people who have not been exposed to years of new flu variants suddenly get slammed. I'm not willing to say that all excess mortality is from COVID.
Though it could very well be higher than what is reported, same as it is in every country. No one wants to admit COVID isn't over.
There've been lots of western estimates with varying levels of veracity, but here's a Chinese study from Fudan University that I think is most valid and interesting. It's from a few months before the opening, but in it they're predicting around 1.5 million deaths if China opened up in the near future. Their numbers line up with western estimates and excess mortality rates from after the opening.
Like a billion people caught covid in the space of a month, it honestly just makes sense that 1/1000 died; covid's dangerous. 60000 just isn't a realistic number of deaths on that scale.
Anecdotally I can also say that I know multiple Chinese people who lost relatives during that period who's deaths were recorded as other things, because they passed away without being tested.
Maybe, but a number several orders of magnitude larger is also hard to believe. The true number could be higher, just like it probably is in every country, but a cover up of that scale would be hard to achieve. At most I can believe half a million i.e. about one order of magnitude.
I mean believe what you want because we're never actually going to know for sure, but if I have to stake a number I'm going with academic studies over vibes.
And there's no "coverup", there's just noone counting. I'm not saying the PRC have maliciously hidden their numbers, I think they've just deliberately made the choice to not know. It's not in anyone's interest to investigate because that might imply that opening up was the wrong decision.
Official government stats aren't vibes.
Also, no one counting is a coverup, same as it is in the US and every other country that isn't properly testing to keep their numbers down.
The scale of this coverup is just so much larger than everyone else in the world, which is what makes it hard to believe.
You deciding that the real number can't be more than an order of magnitude bigger than the official number is vibes. It's completely arbitrary.
I think it's just an open secret, no one in China wants to talk or think about covid anymore. As we've seen, excess deaths stats are very high, so people are aware that more people died than usual, it's just a lack of acknowledgement that it was because of covid because it's easier to just sweep it all under the rug and move on. Same as everywhere really, it's more convenient to just pretend it never happened, otherwise it implies we were all wrong to leave covid behind.
I'm deciding that the real number might be as far off the official number in China as it is in every other developed country. I don't think there's any developed country that has a coverup on this scale. You aren't talking about something that is "same as everywhere really", you're suggesting something totally unique that applies only to China.
Attitudes now are the same as anywhere, but China's specific situation is unique. They went from the tightest covid restrictions in the world to "what's covid?" practically overnight. Literally they closed testing infrastructure and let the majority of the population catch covid in the space of about 6 weeks. Other countries took years to go through the same thing, while maintaining testing and counting (to varying extents obviously) throughout.
Again, I don't think it's a "coverup", I think they legitimately don't know the stats because they stopped testing entirely. It's a big country, a million people can die and its not going to be noticeable on the ground, I sincerely don't see why the Chinese and western death estimates I linked above are so implausible?
The only way this would possibly work is if COVID testing is never done on hospitalized patients who show symptoms or none is ever done afterwards to determine cause of death, and so hundreds of thousands of people are just dying from what would essentially be unknown causes without any specific viral agent being identified. That is absolutely a coverup!
Well then it is a coverup.