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The Chinese state has the ability and means to do what few other countries can - lock down millions of people and mean a lockdown where people are confined to t

The Chinese state has the ability and means to do what few other countries can - lock down millions of people and mean a lockdown where people are confined to their homes. There are also millions of Chinese citizens outside china. If China were hiding millions of deaths, we would have heard about it.

swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
I've heard anecdotally by a Chinese immigrant that many people back home had family members that mysteriously didn't make it. Just the usual "Nothing to see here, move along" that's common to authoritarian regimes who would rather sweep things under the rug than admit failure.
nsxwolf 5y ago
I can accept their extreme methods could potentially suppress outbreaks. But could anything really work this well? And shouldn't it have a breaking point - at some point you run into something like omicron that spreads so quickly it has to overwhelm your ability to track and trace and you can't make testing supplies fast enough or hire people to police it fast enough. And if you're not being given good information, how does an overseas Chinese individual spot anything amiss? Their parent or grandparent dies in China. Well, that's not unusual in itself. It's only unusual if it is happening more frequently than it should, and if that information isn't being made available, how could they know? COVID is rampant in the United States, yet it doesn't seem like my friends parents and grandparents are dying at any particularly worrying rate - and yet overall, they absolutely are. If the data weren't there, it would be hard to notice anything were happening at all. You could lie to me and make me think supply chain issues were caused by something else, that my occasionally crowded local hospital was seeing a bad flu season, etc.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  People have extended social circles in PRC that span hundreds to thousands depending on connections. Family & friends, their acquaintances, coworkers etc. No one I know in PRC has or knows of anyone that's tested positive. Reports are similar from other PRC diaspora as well. Including business owners with thousands of employees. Whereas every Chinese diaspora knows of someone getting covid abroad. Every Indian / Pakistani I know have lost people during delta wave back home. Everyone I know in west knows someone whose tested positive during omicron. And this is with noticeable lockdowns, congested hospitals, burning dead bodies on the streets. Versus PRC that has been open since mid 2020 except for targeted lockdowns. There's also other indicators like import case statistics that many countries maintained into 2020. The TLDR is while flights from North America / EU and other regions were transporting massive amounts covid positives in repatriation flights early in the pandemic, PRC exported very little in the months after Hubei lockdown and then as far as I know, none.

swagasaurus-rex 5y ago

I've heard anecdotally by a Chinese immigrant that many people back home had family members that mysteriously didn't make it. Just the usual "Nothing to see here, move along" that's common to authoritarian regimes who would rather sweep things under the rug than admit failure.

nsxwolf 5y ago

I can accept their extreme methods could potentially suppress outbreaks. But could anything really work this well? And shouldn't it have a breaking point - at some point you run into something like omicron that spreads so quickly it has to overwhelm your ability to track and trace and you can't make testing supplies fast enough or hire people to police it fast enough. And if you're not being given good information, how does an overseas Chinese individual spot anything amiss? Their parent or grandparent dies in China. Well, that's not unusual in itself. It's only unusual if it is happening more frequently than it should, and if that information isn't being made available, how could they know? COVID is rampant in the United States, yet it doesn't seem like my friends parents and grandparents are dying at any particularly worrying rate - and yet overall, they absolutely are. If the data weren't there, it would be hard to notice anything were happening at all. You could lie to me and make me think supply chain issues were caused by something else, that my occasionally crowded local hospital was seeing a bad flu season, etc.

dirtyid 5y ago
People have extended social circles in PRC that span hundreds to thousands depending on connections. Family & friends, their acquaintances, coworkers etc. No one I know in PRC has or knows of anyone that's tested positive. Reports are similar from other PRC diaspora as well. Including business owners with thousands of employees. Whereas every Chinese diaspora knows of someone getting covid abroad. Every Indian / Pakistani I know have lost people during delta wave back home. Everyone I know in west knows someone whose tested positive during omicron. And this is with noticeable lockdowns, congested hospitals, burning dead bodies on the streets. Versus PRC that has been open since mid 2020 except for targeted lockdowns. There's also other indicators like import case statistics that many countries maintained into 2020. The TLDR is while flights from North America / EU and other regions were transporting massive amounts covid positives in repatriation flights early in the pandemic, PRC exported very little in the months after Hubei lockdown and then as far as I know, none.