8 ms·

China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says

99 points by pl0x 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vsskanth 7y ago
Assuming this is correct, what is the estimated death toll in China due to COVID-19, preferably from a reliable source ?
shadowprofile77 7y ago
While im extremely skeptical of China's numbers (by default it's safer to assume that all known case counts in any country are well off the real numbers of cases that haven't been counted) China did use far harsher measures to stop spread (the biggest, most total quarantine of hundreds of millions of people, applied in just weeks), while the U.S has so far not done that or anything close to it, and was very slow even to react to the extent that it has so far. This could thus partly be a case of accusing the other side of lying because you look so bad that blame needs to be spread around even if they did things differently to mitigate their situation better (maybe). Also, China published the vast majority of major case growth/death figures before they (or anyone else really) knew just how bad things would get in Italy, Spain and other countries, yet their mortality rates more or less match a certain global average (they're in fact a bit worse than average) so why would they have lied in such a specific but also partially statistically realistic way? Why not publish less cases and lower death figures if they were going to lie their asses off anyhow? I don't think they're telling the truth, especially about total known cases and total deaths, but maybe they didn't conceal quite as badly as claimed, and harsher measures partly explain the differences in numbers between the U.S and China. Most of all though, it's important to know if whatever concealment they did also distorted: 1. claimed mortality RATE, and 2. if the spread of the virus has been more or less contained finally, as they claim it has. These two are the most important things, more important than actual numbers being off by some margin or another.
- notechback 7y ago
  If they do collect actual numbers but report much lower numbers it should not be too difficult to give realistic ones. Right now the Chinese state media is making a huge effort to paint the virus as a 'foreign' issue, claiming that there are now no new local infections but rather just infections brought in from abroad. This is rather obviously absurd, but it's also obviously an effort to shift blame while claiming a high ground. The Chinese leadership can pretend competence and blame others for any fault - pretending that it wasn't them that started the whole mess to begin with. India (of all countries) had a severe virus outbreak a few years back - immediately local doctors reported it, containment measures were in place and the case numbers stayed somewhere around two hundred. China had the same, but arrested whistleblowers, officially denied everything and only admitted things when the scale and spread was so bad that it couldn't anymore be denied. Still we don't know the true scale and numbers and never will.
  - xster 7y ago
    How is it "obviously absurd"? We've been the ones lamenting that China's been going full dystopia "welding people inside apartments" all the way back in January. Also for those who read beyond the title: "the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials. The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents." And here I am still waiting for Bloomberg to write the other half of their supermicro chip story.
mullingitover 7y ago
"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." It's a little too convenient that the US blew so many weeks of lead time in getting mass testing running. We don't need to suppress information about our virus outbreak when we simply don't have data about it. We literally would've had a better response if the CDC didn't exist at all and individual states weren't impeded from running their own tests. The Seattle Flu Study was explicitly forbidden from testing for coronavirus, and their refusal to obey that order on ethical grounds was probably the reason that they're not suffering New York's fate right now. Not to absolve China here, but it's a classic sin of nations to hide epidemics (see "Spanish Flu") and they probably aren't even the most egregious sinners today.
- notechback 7y ago
  How come European Union countries, South Korea and Taiwan weren't hiding the issue then? They were unaware of the scale for a while, but even Italy did not try for a minute to hide it. Hiding or denying an epidemic is really something that only dictatorships do.
  - mullingitover 7y ago
    I think the degree to which countries hide their numbers matches the degree to which they're authoritarian (or simply corrupt). North Korea sets the bar, with "zero" cases. Russia has suspiciously low numbers. Japan, surprisingly, is not doing well in this area. I think Japan early on was hell-bent on having their olympics happen regardless of the consequences, and their people are going to suffer for it.
    - type0 7y ago
      > Russia has suspiciously low numbers. The virus simply freezes and won't infect in Russia /s
      - blaser-waffle 7y ago
        I'm in Canada and we have surprisngly few cases where we are, relative to the population size (Edmonton). We've had snow and a cold snap, which is definitely keeping people inside. I don't doubt that Russia is downplaying their cases, but I can absolutely believe that the cold is making people self-isolate, and thus keep infection down.
LorenPechtel 7y ago
"Conceal" implies intent--while I do not believe the Chinese numbers I do not think it's malicious, but rather an overwhelmed system. We are seeing the same thing everywhere the system is getting hit hard enough--patients are dying without ever being tested, and they're only testing the people at the hospital, thus missing most all the mild cases. The only places I would trust the numbers are South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Israel.
- notechback 7y ago
  China is literally claiming zero new infections while reports from the affected regions tell a very different story. How is that not an obvious effort to conceal the issue?
  - yfzhou 7y ago
    What reports? China reported 36 new cases yesterday, all but one are people returning from overseas caught under quarantine, and whenever there is sporadic local transmission, they tighten control in that area obviously while the country at large has returned to work. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3078010/chinese-county-goes-coronavirus-lockdown-country-tries-get-back https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3078010/chin...
- Supermancho 7y ago
  > while I do not believe the Chinese numbers I do not think it's malicious Give the reports of outright abuse of power (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquiry-exonerates-coronavirus-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquir...) or corruption, depending on your perspective, I'm not sure why you would say it wasn't malicious. It's been about saving face, if recovery was possible. If not, shrug What are you going to do about it anyway? Trusting anything from official Chinese reports, is foolish. You always need some sort of 3rd party corroboration to get to the truth and the WHO has shown bias (subject to Chinese influence, for their own pragmatic reasons of access). That being said, their model, wherein they locked down populations was effective and appropriate. Combined with testing and some sort of ID-based tagging, the US could probably manage better than the current course, which will just blow up later anyway.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
Clearly the west dropped the ball in important ways, but guidance from the WHO was certainly bad and seemingly deferential to China and its reputation. But if there’s evidence the data and reporting is “concealed,” on top of the clear silencing of doctors (Ai Fen and others), this is egregious.
pubstik 7y ago
It is painfully obvious that china concealed the beginnings of the outbreak, no matter your personal political beliefs, or nationality. To assert anything else, particularly under the guise of (so and so also did this), highlights your comment as insincere. Lets keep the politics out of HN.
- hodgesrm 7y ago
  It's also true that many if not most countries have been reluctant to face up to the scale of the pandemic. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government's obfuscation will turn out to be more or less damaging to the overall response than the inaction of other governments. We're a long way from the end of this episode.
- xster 7y ago
  TL;DR no matter what you think, I'm right. If you think anything else, you're a horrible person. First and final word, let's stop talking about it. This is not a cult /s > The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. These days, I'm going to be more surprised if journalism didn't start with this since the overton window moved so much that this is the norm now.
- showproof 7y ago
  show proof or bullshit
NicoJuicy 7y ago
Not even that, but the WHO was forced to give critical information to China and was not allowed to communicate with Taiwan. Taiwan handled it very well luckily! They never had any information from China and that helped them more than us who had "access" to that information, probably faulty info none the less. What an absurd situation. It's becoming more clear that the WHO was misled by the "positive news" from China and based a lot of guidance on that. While the Western world gets infected, the virus gets real numbers eg. Infection rate, mortality, ... If it wasn't clear that Taiwan is a seperate country before, it should be now.
- showproof 7y ago
  Show proof or bullshit
  - NicoJuicy 7y ago
    Easy to Google, a basic skill nowadays: https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68 https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...
tibbydudeza 7y ago
What did the CIA or NSA been doing in the mean time with all that budget ... aren't they supposed to be informed of all things affecting national security around the globe ???. Did they really expect that an adversarial superpower would admit to the scale of their problem ... the US should have been way better prepared.
- wstuartcl 7y ago
  I am sure they did provide detailed analysis, the issue is we have a president that is not intellectually curious or concerned with information -- instead he believes in his "gut feelings" over all else (and has said as much when talking about how he views intelligence services).
  - tibbydudeza 7y ago
    Also the political cronies with no clue appointed after the good people with all the experience left because they disagreed.
- steve_adams_86 7y ago
  I wondered about this. I've started to think they probably see a lot of threats, tell people, and it's more or less dismissed if it's not immediately clear why it's a threat.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
maximente 7y ago
does anyone take US intelligence seriously any more? seems we have a fairly reliable years-long evidence trail that says it might not be worth it any more. either they're legitimately incompetent (tons of sabre-rattling about the China "threat" yet no intel operations; likely hasn't been rebuilt after China publicly executed tons of spies [quite an effective deterrent it seems]) and they're saying as much here, or they're just deflecting outrage on an external entity doing typical IC stuff, which is complete noise.
kerng 7y ago
I'm curious what actual infection and death rates are in China- there seems to be no mentioning in the article. Given what is happening in Italy and Spain, its probably horrible. :(
haltingproblem 7y ago
As a modeler, in a field unrelated to pandemics and epidemiology, my first reaction was that the estimates of CRF, IFR and R0 are going to be wrong. Which in turn is going to produce wrong estimates from all the models. First, they did not shutdown the wet markets which they should have right after SARs, then they concealed the outbreak for weeks or months and now they are lying about the numbers. How can the Chinese government keep doing this and think they are going to keep getting away with it? They are willing to invest 100s of billions in One Belt One Road to project power but this takes down their credibility by many notches for vast swathes of people around the globe.
showproof 7y ago
How come Korea had it under control so quickly, "given" that China "obviouly" "conceled" the information? Blame blame blame...more blame
showproof 7y ago
Typical techniques used by "professional" "journalist" to cover up and diverge the real issue, which is the incompetency of the US government. You see when you fail at something, isn't it easy to blame someone else, rather than looking at yourself? And REMEMBER these journalists are PAID to write. And YOU, the reader, are only able to comprehend what you are prepared to hear.
thewileyone 7y ago
First of all, nobody knew what it was, what it did and what it could do when it first hit. No one said, "oh, this is the coronavirus COVID-19, and this is the test for it." All this had to be discovered as it got worse. I want to know why this pandemic blew up right after the mysterious vape flu in August last year that has the exact same symptoms as COVID-19 and why this flared up in Wuhan after soldiers from all over the world, about 200 from the US, were in Wuhan for the World Military Games. Wet markets and exotic meats are all over China. Why did it just start in Wuhan?
adultSwim 7y ago
US mounting hybrid warfare
adultSwim 7y ago
Worth pointing out that China's on the ground response was light years ahead of ours in the US. Faster, more coordinated, more robust, calmer..

99 points by pl0x 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Assuming this is correct, what is the estimated death toll in China due to COVID-19, preferably from a reliable source ?

shadowprofile77 7y ago

While im extremely skeptical of China's numbers (by default it's safer to assume that all known case counts in any country are well off the real numbers of cases that haven't been counted) China did use far harsher measures to stop spread (the biggest, most total quarantine of hundreds of millions of people, applied in just weeks), while the U.S has so far not done that or anything close to it, and was very slow even to react to the extent that it has so far. This could thus partly be a case of accusing the other side of lying because you look so bad that blame needs to be spread around even if they did things differently to mitigate their situation better (maybe). Also, China published the vast majority of major case growth/death figures before they (or anyone else really) knew just how bad things would get in Italy, Spain and other countries, yet their mortality rates more or less match a certain global average (they're in fact a bit worse than average) so why would they have lied in such a specific but also partially statistically realistic way? Why not publish less cases and lower death figures if they were going to lie their asses off anyhow? I don't think they're telling the truth, especially about total known cases and total deaths, but maybe they didn't conceal quite as badly as claimed, and harsher measures partly explain the differences in numbers between the U.S and China. Most of all though, it's important to know if whatever concealment they did also distorted: 1. claimed mortality RATE, and 2. if the spread of the virus has been more or less contained finally, as they claim it has. These two are the most important things, more important than actual numbers being off by some margin or another.

notechback 7y ago
If they do collect actual numbers but report much lower numbers it should not be too difficult to give realistic ones. Right now the Chinese state media is making a huge effort to paint the virus as a 'foreign' issue, claiming that there are now no new local infections but rather just infections brought in from abroad. This is rather obviously absurd, but it's also obviously an effort to shift blame while claiming a high ground. The Chinese leadership can pretend competence and blame others for any fault - pretending that it wasn't them that started the whole mess to begin with. India (of all countries) had a severe virus outbreak a few years back - immediately local doctors reported it, containment measures were in place and the case numbers stayed somewhere around two hundred. China had the same, but arrested whistleblowers, officially denied everything and only admitted things when the scale and spread was so bad that it couldn't anymore be denied. Still we don't know the true scale and numbers and never will.
- xster 7y ago
  How is it "obviously absurd"? We've been the ones lamenting that China's been going full dystopia "welding people inside apartments" all the way back in January. Also for those who read beyond the title: "the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials. The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents." And here I am still waiting for Bloomberg to write the other half of their supermicro chip story.

mullingitover 7y ago

"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." It's a little too convenient that the US blew so many weeks of lead time in getting mass testing running. We don't need to suppress information about our virus outbreak when we simply don't have data about it. We literally would've had a better response if the CDC didn't exist at all and individual states weren't impeded from running their own tests. The Seattle Flu Study was explicitly forbidden from testing for coronavirus, and their refusal to obey that order on ethical grounds was probably the reason that they're not suffering New York's fate right now. Not to absolve China here, but it's a classic sin of nations to hide epidemics (see "Spanish Flu") and they probably aren't even the most egregious sinners today.

notechback 7y ago
How come European Union countries, South Korea and Taiwan weren't hiding the issue then? They were unaware of the scale for a while, but even Italy did not try for a minute to hide it. Hiding or denying an epidemic is really something that only dictatorships do.
- mullingitover 7y ago
  I think the degree to which countries hide their numbers matches the degree to which they're authoritarian (or simply corrupt). North Korea sets the bar, with "zero" cases. Russia has suspiciously low numbers. Japan, surprisingly, is not doing well in this area. I think Japan early on was hell-bent on having their olympics happen regardless of the consequences, and their people are going to suffer for it.
  - type0 7y ago
    > Russia has suspiciously low numbers. The virus simply freezes and won't infect in Russia /s
    - blaser-waffle 7y ago
      I'm in Canada and we have surprisngly few cases where we are, relative to the population size (Edmonton). We've had snow and a cold snap, which is definitely keeping people inside. I don't doubt that Russia is downplaying their cases, but I can absolutely believe that the cold is making people self-isolate, and thus keep infection down.

LorenPechtel 7y ago

"Conceal" implies intent--while I do not believe the Chinese numbers I do not think it's malicious, but rather an overwhelmed system. We are seeing the same thing everywhere the system is getting hit hard enough--patients are dying without ever being tested, and they're only testing the people at the hospital, thus missing most all the mild cases. The only places I would trust the numbers are South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Israel.

notechback 7y ago
China is literally claiming zero new infections while reports from the affected regions tell a very different story. How is that not an obvious effort to conceal the issue?
- yfzhou 7y ago
  What reports? China reported 36 new cases yesterday, all but one are people returning from overseas caught under quarantine, and whenever there is sporadic local transmission, they tighten control in that area obviously while the country at large has returned to work. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3078010/chinese-county-goes-coronavirus-lockdown-country-tries-get-back https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3078010/chin...
Supermancho 7y ago
> while I do not believe the Chinese numbers I do not think it's malicious Give the reports of outright abuse of power (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquiry-exonerates-coronavirus-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquir...) or corruption, depending on your perspective, I'm not sure why you would say it wasn't malicious. It's been about saving face, if recovery was possible. If not, shrug What are you going to do about it anyway? Trusting anything from official Chinese reports, is foolish. You always need some sort of 3rd party corroboration to get to the truth and the WHO has shown bias (subject to Chinese influence, for their own pragmatic reasons of access). That being said, their model, wherein they locked down populations was effective and appropriate. Combined with testing and some sort of ID-based tagging, the US could probably manage better than the current course, which will just blow up later anyway.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gnusty_gnurc 7y ago

Clearly the west dropped the ball in important ways, but guidance from the WHO was certainly bad and seemingly deferential to China and its reputation. But if there’s evidence the data and reporting is “concealed,” on top of the clear silencing of doctors (Ai Fen and others), this is egregious.

pubstik 7y ago

It is painfully obvious that china concealed the beginnings of the outbreak, no matter your personal political beliefs, or nationality. To assert anything else, particularly under the guise of (so and so also did this), highlights your comment as insincere. Lets keep the politics out of HN.

hodgesrm 7y ago
It's also true that many if not most countries have been reluctant to face up to the scale of the pandemic. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government's obfuscation will turn out to be more or less damaging to the overall response than the inaction of other governments. We're a long way from the end of this episode.
xster 7y ago
TL;DR no matter what you think, I'm right. If you think anything else, you're a horrible person. First and final word, let's stop talking about it. This is not a cult /s > The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. These days, I'm going to be more surprised if journalism didn't start with this since the overton window moved so much that this is the norm now.
showproof 7y ago
show proof or bullshit

NicoJuicy 7y ago

Not even that, but the WHO was forced to give critical information to China and was not allowed to communicate with Taiwan. Taiwan handled it very well luckily! They never had any information from China and that helped them more than us who had "access" to that information, probably faulty info none the less. What an absurd situation. It's becoming more clear that the WHO was misled by the "positive news" from China and based a lot of guidance on that. While the Western world gets infected, the virus gets real numbers eg. Infection rate, mortality, ... If it wasn't clear that Taiwan is a seperate country before, it should be now.

showproof 7y ago
Show proof or bullshit
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  Easy to Google, a basic skill nowadays: https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68 https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...

tibbydudeza 7y ago

What did the CIA or NSA been doing in the mean time with all that budget ... aren't they supposed to be informed of all things affecting national security around the globe ???. Did they really expect that an adversarial superpower would admit to the scale of their problem ... the US should have been way better prepared.

wstuartcl 7y ago
I am sure they did provide detailed analysis, the issue is we have a president that is not intellectually curious or concerned with information -- instead he believes in his "gut feelings" over all else (and has said as much when talking about how he views intelligence services).
- tibbydudeza 7y ago
  Also the political cronies with no clue appointed after the good people with all the experience left because they disagreed.
steve_adams_86 7y ago
I wondered about this. I've started to think they probably see a lot of threats, tell people, and it's more or less dismissed if it's not immediately clear why it's a threat.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

maximente 7y ago

does anyone take US intelligence seriously any more? seems we have a fairly reliable years-long evidence trail that says it might not be worth it any more. either they're legitimately incompetent (tons of sabre-rattling about the China "threat" yet no intel operations; likely hasn't been rebuilt after China publicly executed tons of spies [quite an effective deterrent it seems]) and they're saying as much here, or they're just deflecting outrage on an external entity doing typical IC stuff, which is complete noise.

kerng 7y ago

I'm curious what actual infection and death rates are in China- there seems to be no mentioning in the article. Given what is happening in Italy and Spain, its probably horrible. :(

haltingproblem 7y ago

As a modeler, in a field unrelated to pandemics and epidemiology, my first reaction was that the estimates of CRF, IFR and R0 are going to be wrong. Which in turn is going to produce wrong estimates from all the models. First, they did not shutdown the wet markets which they should have right after SARs, then they concealed the outbreak for weeks or months and now they are lying about the numbers. How can the Chinese government keep doing this and think they are going to keep getting away with it? They are willing to invest 100s of billions in One Belt One Road to project power but this takes down their credibility by many notches for vast swathes of people around the globe.

showproof 7y ago

How come Korea had it under control so quickly, "given" that China "obviouly" "conceled" the information? Blame blame blame...more blame

showproof 7y ago

Typical techniques used by "professional" "journalist" to cover up and diverge the real issue, which is the incompetency of the US government. You see when you fail at something, isn't it easy to blame someone else, rather than looking at yourself? And REMEMBER these journalists are PAID to write. And YOU, the reader, are only able to comprehend what you are prepared to hear.

thewileyone 7y ago

First of all, nobody knew what it was, what it did and what it could do when it first hit. No one said, "oh, this is the coronavirus COVID-19, and this is the test for it." All this had to be discovered as it got worse. I want to know why this pandemic blew up right after the mysterious vape flu in August last year that has the exact same symptoms as COVID-19 and why this flared up in Wuhan after soldiers from all over the world, about 200 from the US, were in Wuhan for the World Military Games. Wet markets and exotic meats are all over China. Why did it just start in Wuhan?

adultSwim 7y ago

US mounting hybrid warfare

adultSwim 7y ago

Worth pointing out that China's on the ground response was light years ahead of ours in the US. Faster, more coordinated, more robust, calmer..