> May I ask, what do you believe the Chinese death toll has been in total so far? The official number is 4642 I think. So if other countries are as efficient as

> May I ask, what do you believe the Chinese death toll has been in total so far? The official number is 4642 I think. So if other countries are as efficient as China, this whole pandemic will kill only around 23,000 world wide. Let's up the Chinese are being accurate and we get these excellent numbers! Your reasoning doesn't make any sense. The number of deaths is dependent on the number of people that get sick. China's lower number of deaths simply reflects the stricter containment measures it took to control the spread of the epidemic. The mortality rate among those who get infected is probably similar in China and Western countries. I could imagine that the mortality rate might vary by a factor of a few, based on how many ventilators are available, how overwhelmed hospitals are, and other similar factors. But the percentage of the total population that gets infected can vary by orders of magnitude, based on how aggressively you contain the epidemic. As of yesterday, based on the number of confirmed cases (a lower limit, but it gives you a sense of the differences): * 0.02% of the population of South Korea has contracted the virus. * 0.3% of the population of the United States has contracted the virus. Expecting the same percentage of the population to die in South Korea and the United States would be silly, based on the very different rates of infection. The same goes for China. > I am actually very happy to concede that the Chinese government has been effective (after the first few weeks of the outbreak at least). Then why is it so surprising to you that the extreme public health interventions they took (cordons sanitaires, quarantine centers, strict lock-downs of many cities, regular symptom checks for large swaths of the population, etc.) suppressed the reproductive rate of the virus and drove the number of new infections down drastically?