8 ms·

I don’t understand what it is that the Chinese authorities are supposedly misreporting? The mortality rate of 2% is consistent with the number of cases and dea

by chvid 7y ago

I don’t understand what it is that the Chinese authorities are supposedly misreporting? The mortality rate of 2% is consistent with the number of cases and deaths reported by other countries. Is it that there are a large number of undiagnosed cases? That is kind of a given and is probably also the case in other countries. The timespan between first case and until it gets reported to who and quarantines start is less than a month. To me that seems very fast (but I am just a layperson).

Spare_account 7y ago
Presumably they could be under-reporting the number of infections and the number of deaths, to keep the mortality rate consistent. I don't know why they would do that, but they are accused of doing this kind of thing frequently. If they sat on the news of the virus for an extended period they might have known the mortality rate they needed to align with long before the rest us.
- hef19898 7y ago
  If Chinese authorities are under reporting both, death and infections, inorder to drive "true" mortality up that would mean there more unreported people dying in relation to people being infected compared to the reported numbers. And yet every real expert out there is telling us the opposite is more likely because only the more severe cases tend to be reported. And mortality is expected to be lower if the unreported cases are considered. Not sure why laypeople prefer to believe the contrary of what experts are telling us.
  - ryanwaggoner 7y ago
    Every expert is not saying that the infection rate is much higher than the official numbers, but the death rate is reliable. They’re both unreliable and we just don’t know the true numbers. China’s reaction is not comforting though.
    - irq11 7y ago
      No, you misunderstood the parent, as well as the facts: experts are saying that the widely parroted “2%” number is an overestimate, and that the real infection rate is lower. Deaths are easy to count. Minor cases of the virus are likely the most common sort, and never show up in a hospital at all.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Exactly that!
      - cobookman 7y ago
        Deaths are easy to count if they are counted. Local doctors have photos of more dead in the hospital than were reported by China. Numbers don’t line up based on a basic statistical analysis. Checkout these videos for reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIt496d82s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIt496d82s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkF4qYdNU9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkF4qYdNU9Y
      - ryanwaggoner 7y ago
        No, I didn’t misunderstand anything. The “real experts” are saying that the denominator (number of infected) is likely much higher than official numbers. But they are not saying that the numerator (deaths) is accurately represented by official figures. Deaths are easy to count if you only count deaths of confirmed infected people. There’s plenty of evidence that people are dying outside of the medical system, and that China is not accurately reporting all deaths from within the medical system as being caused by the virus. In short, we have no idea, and it’s very dishonest to claim that either number is remotely reliable at this point.
        hef19898 7y ago
        Now the interesting question is which number is greater, unreported cases or unreported deaths. I'd say the number of unreported cases tends to be way higher than unreported deaths. Fits apparently epidemics in general. Also it is kind of logic. Severe cases have a bias to end up in hospitals, and to reported when they end deadly, only leaving the measuring error due to reporting issues. Less severe cases on the other hand have a tendency to end up unreported, not in the hospital. Neither deadly. Still leaves a number of never reported cases. All in all, unreported cases are likely to be higher than unreported deaths. As a result, qualitatively speaking, mortality should be lower.
raverbashing 7y ago
The question I'm still not sure is: of those who were infected, how many have been discharged from the hospital already? What was their mean recovery time?
- Laforet 7y ago
  Just over 2300 have been discharged based on a 10-day absence of viral RNA in throat swabs. There has been some discussion about changing the guidelines to discharge patients after 3 days without viral titre but I'm not sure if this has been adopted. Any comment about recovery time would have to be made after the dust settles.
- lrem 7y ago
  https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
  - lrem 7y ago
    Source of truth, if you're not afraid of a couple more clicks to get to the data: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/ https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
dredmorbius 7y ago
Chinese authorities at some level -- it's not clear that this was CCP or local Wuhan decisionmakers -- clearly tried to shut down initial reports of the outbreak, as evidenced by Dr. Li Wenliang's detention and citation. As a new disease, with the first cases possibly being acquired as early as late November 2019, it wasn't until mid to late January 2020 that city and national authorities appeared to start taking the outbreak seriously. I'm not aware of other novel outbreaks outside of China and how quickly those have attracted notice, though there's the case of the 1976 initial outbreak of Legionaire's Disease, reported within a week of first outbreak (though the disease was both fast-acting and rapidly lethal for many victims). However epidemiologists also realised that there had been previous, unrecognised outbreaks, dating to the 1950s. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires%27_disease_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... The case of HIV/AIDS in the US and elsehwere would be a case of a disease with ascribed social and moral assocations, for which early responses were very much delayed, on of several examples of stigma associated with the disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_with_HIV/AIDS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_... Reponse to the 2012 MERS outbreak appears to have been swift -- in November of 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Middle_East_respiratory_s... The 2003 SARS epidemic, also emerging in China, also first emerged in November, but was not internationally reported until the following March: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... (The fact that SARS, MERS, and 2019-nCoV all appear to have emerged during November may be significant.) Point being: - China are slow to detect, report, and respond to new contagious epidemics. Notably so in the case of SARS, and less so, but still, with 2019-nCoV. - Other countries, including the US, have had similar failures. - Early unofficial public disclosure of 2019-nCoV was prosecuted by Chinese authorities, though at what direction is unclear. - Trust between the people and the government is somewhat frayed. - There are also numerous actors with incentives to make the most of any missteps of the government, or to inflate distrust. Several of those groups have legitimate gripes against the Chinese government, and I've seen reports associated with Falun Gong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan specifically. I've not seen any associated with Tibet or Uygher populations. And there are various rabble-rousing actors elsewhere, doomers, and conspiracists (generally of the nutcake variety). This ... clouds information. Many of the criticisms are legimate, some are not, and sorting fact from fiction (both between and within reports) is challenging. China are in the position where both locked-down and unfettered communications are potentially harmful -- the first for preventing accurate information from being available to both public and government, the latter for allowing agents provacateurs to rumourmonger, exaggerate bad news, and spread active disinforation. This is strong shades of attacks the West has seen over the past several years (within the US, UK, EU, and elsewhere), some of it from China itself. How China responds will be interesting.
SteveHawk27 7y ago
The main reason now is that the confirmation method of infection is still under debate and improvement. The current method is nucleic acid detection, which only has about 50% accuracy, so obviously a huge number of people out there cannot be diagnosed, and they won't be added to the official number. And there are also rumors out there saying the lack of medical resources. Sick people couldn't get proper medical treatment and dying at home or somewhere. Because they didn't get diagnosed before they die, so the number won't be added to the official number. Don't know if it's true or how many people are dying there, but sure it's terrifying. About misreporting, they did do it back in January, mainly because they want to control the panic as they always do, (and probably they didn't know it's gonna be this bad), but it should be much better now (I hope).
- funklute 7y ago
  Just as an aside: "accuracy" is a pointless measure if you don't also know the ratio of true cases to false cases. The metrics you really want is the True/False Positive rates - without that you can't gauge the quality of a test like this.
  - SteveHawk27 7y ago
    Quite so. The data I got is that among the people who really got the virus, positive rate of the test is only 30% - 50%. So false negative rate is as high as 50-70%. The news report (in Chinese): http://www.caixin.com/2020-02-07/101512517.html http://www.caixin.com/2020-02-07/101512517.html
    - funklute 7y ago
      Ouch, that is pretty disappointing numbers :(
      - SteveHawk27 7y ago
        Yeah. It's not that bad outside Wuhan, people who infected will get top level treatment, there will be best experts doing the diagnostics. But for Wuhan, where medical resources are extremely in short, we can only pray for the people there. Hope it's gonna be better.
Roritharr 7y ago
twitter.com/evdefender has a good analysis of their numbers: https://twitter.com/evdefender/status/1223887384892313600 https://twitter.com/evdefender/status/1223887384892313600
rorykoehler 7y ago
Lots of undiagnosed cases and under reporting of deaths is a possibility.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Which, from what I read so far, should drive mortality down. Reason is that unreported cases trend towards less severe cases with an overall lower mortality rate. And nobody is disputing that kind of underreporting in any way. So I'm not sure why everybody is making such a fuss about that.
  - thomasz 7y ago
    Underreporting of infections leads to a overestimated mortality rate, underreporting of deaths leads to an underestimed mortality rate.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      If you underreporting deaths without underreporting infections doesn't work. You can underreport deaths, sure. But you have to consider the underreporting of cases as well. And all these cases have bias towards being less severe. Also, the underreporting of infections is kind of systematic. So in order to increase mortality by underreporting both, infections and deaths, the mortality rate of unreported cases has to be higher than the rate for reported cases. Which is unlikely, severe cases have a tendency to show up at hospitals. So unless you believe authorities are getting with hiding hundreds of deaths at hospitals being under international scrutiny, while simultaneously hiding the fact that dead people pile up at their homes, this theory seems kind of unlikely. Especially since international numbers outside of mainland China are more or less in line.
      - rorykoehler 7y ago
        I dunno if you’ve seen any of the undercover videos from the hospitals? It’s entirely possible there are hundreds of deaths that haven’t been recorded. Many deaths are being recorded with viral pneumonia as death as they don’t have enough test kits to verify and are therefore not attributed to this coronavirus.
torgian 7y ago
Take this with a grain of salt: My wife, when she went to the hospital to be diagnosed, said that they had a separate room for those that were diagnosed with having the Wuhan virus, and a separate room for those that did not. She saw several people in that room, and yet over the next few days, only one new case was reported from that hospital. I don’t know if this is due to unconfirmed or bad diagnosis, but this is just yet another red flag in a country full of red flags. As for my wife, she only had a respiratory infection and got medicine for it. She’s better now, but now her mother is sick -.-
- dmos62 7y ago
  Good luck to you and yours. My grandparents are worried and they're on the other side of the planet. I can only imagine what the atmosphere is in your region.
ComodoHacker 7y ago
>The mortality rate of 2% As a reminder, don't mix this rate with case fatality (or lethality) rate, which is counted on ended cases and is about 30%. This is your real chance when you're infected.
- empath75 7y ago
  There’s lots of people who aren’t going to hospitals and aren’t tracked. If it’s really a 30% fatality rate, we’re going to lose a billion people to this before it over.
- hef19898 7y ago
  You really should read up again on that...
  - ComodoHacker 7y ago
    >case fatality rate: the number of deaths due to a specific disease as compared to the total number of cases of the disease. [0] You can't take a case into account until you know its outcome. What am I missing? 0. https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/lethality+rate https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/lethality+r...
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Official mortality rate is 2.1%. Deaths per confirmed infections. And yes, the WHO isn't that stupid to count cases that aren't decided yet. And yes, they are smart enough to take the appr. three weeks it usually takes until death into account. No idea where you got that 30% from. Even in Wuhan, with its medical infrastructure close to the breaking point, we are talking about 4.9%.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Just checked the last Situation Report from Feb. 7th from the WHO: 31,211 confirmed cases and 637 deaths in China. Makes a rate of roughly 2.04%. And I trust the WHO to get the calculation behind that right.

by chvid 7y ago

Spare_account 7y ago

Presumably they could be under-reporting the number of infections and the number of deaths, to keep the mortality rate consistent. I don't know why they would do that, but they are accused of doing this kind of thing frequently. If they sat on the news of the virus for an extended period they might have known the mortality rate they needed to align with long before the rest us.

hef19898 7y ago
If Chinese authorities are under reporting both, death and infections, inorder to drive "true" mortality up that would mean there more unreported people dying in relation to people being infected compared to the reported numbers. And yet every real expert out there is telling us the opposite is more likely because only the more severe cases tend to be reported. And mortality is expected to be lower if the unreported cases are considered. Not sure why laypeople prefer to believe the contrary of what experts are telling us.
- ryanwaggoner 7y ago
  Every expert is not saying that the infection rate is much higher than the official numbers, but the death rate is reliable. They’re both unreliable and we just don’t know the true numbers. China’s reaction is not comforting though.
  - irq11 7y ago
    No, you misunderstood the parent, as well as the facts: experts are saying that the widely parroted “2%” number is an overestimate, and that the real infection rate is lower. Deaths are easy to count. Minor cases of the virus are likely the most common sort, and never show up in a hospital at all.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Exactly that!
    - cobookman 7y ago
      Deaths are easy to count if they are counted. Local doctors have photos of more dead in the hospital than were reported by China. Numbers don’t line up based on a basic statistical analysis. Checkout these videos for reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIt496d82s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSIt496d82s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkF4qYdNU9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkF4qYdNU9Y
    - ryanwaggoner 7y ago
      No, I didn’t misunderstand anything. The “real experts” are saying that the denominator (number of infected) is likely much higher than official numbers. But they are not saying that the numerator (deaths) is accurately represented by official figures. Deaths are easy to count if you only count deaths of confirmed infected people. There’s plenty of evidence that people are dying outside of the medical system, and that China is not accurately reporting all deaths from within the medical system as being caused by the virus. In short, we have no idea, and it’s very dishonest to claim that either number is remotely reliable at this point.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Now the interesting question is which number is greater, unreported cases or unreported deaths. I'd say the number of unreported cases tends to be way higher than unreported deaths. Fits apparently epidemics in general. Also it is kind of logic. Severe cases have a bias to end up in hospitals, and to reported when they end deadly, only leaving the measuring error due to reporting issues. Less severe cases on the other hand have a tendency to end up unreported, not in the hospital. Neither deadly. Still leaves a number of never reported cases. All in all, unreported cases are likely to be higher than unreported deaths. As a result, qualitatively speaking, mortality should be lower.

raverbashing 7y ago

The question I'm still not sure is: of those who were infected, how many have been discharged from the hospital already? What was their mean recovery time?

Laforet 7y ago
Just over 2300 have been discharged based on a 10-day absence of viral RNA in throat swabs. There has been some discussion about changing the guidelines to discharge patients after 3 days without viral titre but I'm not sure if this has been adopted. Any comment about recovery time would have to be made after the dust settles.
lrem 7y ago
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
- lrem 7y ago
  Source of truth, if you're not afraid of a couple more clicks to get to the data: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/ https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

dredmorbius 7y ago

Chinese authorities at some level -- it's not clear that this was CCP or local Wuhan decisionmakers -- clearly tried to shut down initial reports of the outbreak, as evidenced by Dr. Li Wenliang's detention and citation. As a new disease, with the first cases possibly being acquired as early as late November 2019, it wasn't until mid to late January 2020 that city and national authorities appeared to start taking the outbreak seriously. I'm not aware of other novel outbreaks outside of China and how quickly those have attracted notice, though there's the case of the 1976 initial outbreak of Legionaire's Disease, reported within a week of first outbreak (though the disease was both fast-acting and rapidly lethal for many victims). However epidemiologists also realised that there had been previous, unrecognised outbreaks, dating to the 1950s. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires%27_disease_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... The case of HIV/AIDS in the US and elsehwere would be a case of a disease with ascribed social and moral assocations, for which early responses were very much delayed, on of several examples of stigma associated with the disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_with_HIV/AIDS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_... Reponse to the 2012 MERS outbreak appears to have been swift -- in November of 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Middle_East_respiratory_s... The 2003 SARS epidemic, also emerging in China, also first emerged in November, but was not internationally reported until the following March: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... (The fact that SARS, MERS, and 2019-nCoV all appear to have emerged during November may be significant.) Point being: - China are slow to detect, report, and respond to new contagious epidemics. Notably so in the case of SARS, and less so, but still, with 2019-nCoV. - Other countries, including the US, have had similar failures. - Early unofficial public disclosure of 2019-nCoV was prosecuted by Chinese authorities, though at what direction is unclear. - Trust between the people and the government is somewhat frayed. - There are also numerous actors with incentives to make the most of any missteps of the government, or to inflate distrust. Several of those groups have legitimate gripes against the Chinese government, and I've seen reports associated with Falun Gong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan specifically. I've not seen any associated with Tibet or Uygher populations. And there are various rabble-rousing actors elsewhere, doomers, and conspiracists (generally of the nutcake variety). This ... clouds information. Many of the criticisms are legimate, some are not, and sorting fact from fiction (both between and within reports) is challenging. China are in the position where both locked-down and unfettered communications are potentially harmful -- the first for preventing accurate information from being available to both public and government, the latter for allowing agents provacateurs to rumourmonger, exaggerate bad news, and spread active disinforation. This is strong shades of attacks the West has seen over the past several years (within the US, UK, EU, and elsewhere), some of it from China itself. How China responds will be interesting.

SteveHawk27 7y ago

The main reason now is that the confirmation method of infection is still under debate and improvement. The current method is nucleic acid detection, which only has about 50% accuracy, so obviously a huge number of people out there cannot be diagnosed, and they won't be added to the official number. And there are also rumors out there saying the lack of medical resources. Sick people couldn't get proper medical treatment and dying at home or somewhere. Because they didn't get diagnosed before they die, so the number won't be added to the official number. Don't know if it's true or how many people are dying there, but sure it's terrifying. About misreporting, they did do it back in January, mainly because they want to control the panic as they always do, (and probably they didn't know it's gonna be this bad), but it should be much better now (I hope).

funklute 7y ago
Just as an aside: "accuracy" is a pointless measure if you don't also know the ratio of true cases to false cases. The metrics you really want is the True/False Positive rates - without that you can't gauge the quality of a test like this.
- SteveHawk27 7y ago
  Quite so. The data I got is that among the people who really got the virus, positive rate of the test is only 30% - 50%. So false negative rate is as high as 50-70%. The news report (in Chinese): http://www.caixin.com/2020-02-07/101512517.html http://www.caixin.com/2020-02-07/101512517.html
  - funklute 7y ago
    Ouch, that is pretty disappointing numbers :(
    - SteveHawk27 7y ago
      Yeah. It's not that bad outside Wuhan, people who infected will get top level treatment, there will be best experts doing the diagnostics. But for Wuhan, where medical resources are extremely in short, we can only pray for the people there. Hope it's gonna be better.

Roritharr 7y ago

twitter.com/evdefender has a good analysis of their numbers: https://twitter.com/evdefender/status/1223887384892313600 https://twitter.com/evdefender/status/1223887384892313600

rorykoehler 7y ago

Lots of undiagnosed cases and under reporting of deaths is a possibility.

hef19898 7y ago
Which, from what I read so far, should drive mortality down. Reason is that unreported cases trend towards less severe cases with an overall lower mortality rate. And nobody is disputing that kind of underreporting in any way. So I'm not sure why everybody is making such a fuss about that.
- thomasz 7y ago
  Underreporting of infections leads to a overestimated mortality rate, underreporting of deaths leads to an underestimed mortality rate.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    If you underreporting deaths without underreporting infections doesn't work. You can underreport deaths, sure. But you have to consider the underreporting of cases as well. And all these cases have bias towards being less severe. Also, the underreporting of infections is kind of systematic. So in order to increase mortality by underreporting both, infections and deaths, the mortality rate of unreported cases has to be higher than the rate for reported cases. Which is unlikely, severe cases have a tendency to show up at hospitals. So unless you believe authorities are getting with hiding hundreds of deaths at hospitals being under international scrutiny, while simultaneously hiding the fact that dead people pile up at their homes, this theory seems kind of unlikely. Especially since international numbers outside of mainland China are more or less in line.
    - rorykoehler 7y ago
      I dunno if you’ve seen any of the undercover videos from the hospitals? It’s entirely possible there are hundreds of deaths that haven’t been recorded. Many deaths are being recorded with viral pneumonia as death as they don’t have enough test kits to verify and are therefore not attributed to this coronavirus.

torgian 7y ago

Take this with a grain of salt: My wife, when she went to the hospital to be diagnosed, said that they had a separate room for those that were diagnosed with having the Wuhan virus, and a separate room for those that did not. She saw several people in that room, and yet over the next few days, only one new case was reported from that hospital. I don’t know if this is due to unconfirmed or bad diagnosis, but this is just yet another red flag in a country full of red flags. As for my wife, she only had a respiratory infection and got medicine for it. She’s better now, but now her mother is sick -.-

dmos62 7y ago
Good luck to you and yours. My grandparents are worried and they're on the other side of the planet. I can only imagine what the atmosphere is in your region.

ComodoHacker 7y ago

>The mortality rate of 2% As a reminder, don't mix this rate with case fatality (or lethality) rate, which is counted on ended cases and is about 30%. This is your real chance when you're infected.

empath75 7y ago
There’s lots of people who aren’t going to hospitals and aren’t tracked. If it’s really a 30% fatality rate, we’re going to lose a billion people to this before it over.
hef19898 7y ago
You really should read up again on that...
- ComodoHacker 7y ago
  >case fatality rate: the number of deaths due to a specific disease as compared to the total number of cases of the disease. [0] You can't take a case into account until you know its outcome. What am I missing? 0. https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/lethality+rate https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/lethality+r...
  - hef19898 7y ago
    Official mortality rate is 2.1%. Deaths per confirmed infections. And yes, the WHO isn't that stupid to count cases that aren't decided yet. And yes, they are smart enough to take the appr. three weeks it usually takes until death into account. No idea where you got that 30% from. Even in Wuhan, with its medical infrastructure close to the breaking point, we are talking about 4.9%.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Just checked the last Situation Report from Feb. 7th from the WHO: 31,211 confirmed cases and 637 deaths in China. Makes a rate of roughly 2.04%. And I trust the WHO to get the calculation behind that right.