The editors of the Washington Post don’t believe the official Chinese statistics on COVID-19:
Judging by the numbers, China appears to be experiencing a far different pandemic than the rest of the world. In the latest surge in Shanghai, its largest city with a population of 25 million, China has reported more than 300,000 cases since early March and no deaths. By contrast, the world as a whole has experienced about 195 deaths for every 100,000 population as of last November. Can China’s statistics be believed?
The death toll is not the only anomaly. Throughout the world, at least 500 million people have been infected. According to estimates surveying millions of cases, about 40 percent of them — sometimes more, sometimes less — were asymptomatic, meaning they tested positive but without symptoms. And the rest had symptoms ranging from mild to serious, including hospitalization and death.
But the data reported from China shows a virus that is causing very little symptomatic or serious illness. In reports from Shanghai, cases are overwhelmingly asymptomatic. On April 10, for example, there were 25,173 new asymptomatic infections, compared to only 914 symptomatic ones, or about 3.6 percent. On April 13, China reported 25,146 asymptomatic cases and 2,573 symptomatic, or 10 percent. China’s population has been widely vaccinated, although the rate is low among the elderly.
So why so few symptomatic infections?
At present China’s official mortality rate is three per million population. If true, that would be 10% of Taiwan’s, 2% of South Korea’s, 1% of Japan’s, and .1% that of the United States. Is it possible that the draconian measures put in place were effective and China’s official statistics are correct? Yes, it is, but I think it’s unlikely. I doubt that officials in Beijing actually know the truth for a reason commonplace in China: local officials are reluctant to give bad news. Nonetheless it remains possible.
A century or two centuries from now historians will dig through old records trying to understand what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic of the 2020s just as today’s historians dig through old records to understand the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Maybe they’ll figure out what actually happened but, frankly, I doubt it.
So I will make the counter-argument.
Singapore — which no one has accused of fudging numbers, has a CFR of 0.1% vs the US rate of 1.2%.
From the outbreak in HK, Chinese vaccines were surprisingly found to be about as effective as mRNA vaccines in preventing hospitalization / death (to within a couple of percent) — the only significant advantage Western vaccines had were for those that took 1 shot only. Again, these numbers from HK have been found reliable. Given China is heavily vaccinated (88% vs 78% in the US) — that would argue for a lot of asymptomatic cases vs symptomatic cases.
As well, China has access to Paxlovid. They have a contract with Pfizer and they are a part of UN program to produce generics. That would get deaths / hospitalizations by 90%.
Finally, the 40% asymptomatic / 60% symptomatic argument came from before Omicron. Also, China uses testing to decide who goes into central quarantine — i.e. they have incentive to bias tests to false positives over false negatives; (i.e. prefer quarantine people who don’t need it over missing someone who spreads the disease); that would be accomplished by having extremely high CT values in PCR tests.
All in all — one should wait to see the complete set of data; since the outbreak started around early March, and they just reported the first deaths (the normal 6 weeks from detection to death for COVID).