Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

stdio.sangwhan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 219 posts

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#11

Post by macewindu »

enaaem wrote: post #6
phoenixstrike wrote: post #3

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers. Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having…

The big difference is that the chines communist party is actively suppressing messages And prosecuting people who go against the governments narrative.

> The big difference is that the chines communist party is actively suppressing messages And prosecuting people who go against the governments narrative.

Unlike the USA?

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#13

Post by duxup »

macewindu wrote: post #11
enaaem wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is that the chines communist party is actively suppressing messages And prosecuting people who go against the governments narrative.

> The big difference is that the chines communist party is actively suppressing messages And prosecuting people who go against the governments narrative. Unlike the USA?

Very much unlike the USA.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#14

Post by guardiangod »

Knowing Japan, I bet some poor freshly graduated but elite sod in the health ministry was, out of the blue, told by his boss "here's a bunch of reports from different prefectures. Make a report out of them." So he goes off and try to make sense of the data, which is why you see those magic and unexplained equations in the report.

The kicker is the most complex computer thing he ever did in his life was that Word presentation in university. HTML? Isn't that something you write by hand?

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#15

Post by keiferski »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #3

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers. Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having…

This is a false equivalency. China is a totalitarian state that quite literally controls information; Japan and the US are not in any real sense. About six months ago, on a different HN topic, I said this about China's claim that foreigners committed crimes and thus couldn't leave the country:

I call it “crying wolf in reverse”: The problem with being a totalitarian state that falsely imprisons people on a regular basis is that you’ve lost all moral authority when it comes to arresting people for actual crimes. If you’ve falsified evidence, conducted show trials and made a mockery of rule of law before, why should anyone believe you when you say it’s a real crime this time?

We're seeing a similar situation with regards to their Covid-19 reporting. Is it necessarily inaccurate? No, but lying about everything else doesn't exactly lend us to trust you this time.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#16

Post by coliveira »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #3

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers. Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having…

There are wild accusations against Chinese government, when in fact we now see that they put the most stringent measures to avoid the escalation of this virus, which in fact they succeeded in doing, at least inside China. On the other hand, I live in one of the early focus of the virus in the USA, and the federal and local authorities told us to just wash hands, avoid handshakes, and continue our normal life. Against a virus that is treated in other countries with hazmat suits! In my opinion THIS is criminal, on the same level of what happened in Chernobyl, knowing everything that we knew about the crisis situation in China and Korea. Now the virus is out of control in the US and the government still has the nerve to tell us that this is the fault of someone else.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#17

Post by ggggtez »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #3

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers. Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having…

Surprisingly, as a person complaining about gullibility of other people, I really don't know how you came to the conclusion that everyone believes Japan's numbers.

Almost every article I've read that has mentioned Japan's low rate has raised the concern the numbers are faked. They highlight that it has a high rate of smoking, lots of travel to/from china, and very crowded cities. Each of these raises the risk. So I'd say reporters have been skeptical.

On the other hand, China is not just suspected of lying, but have been proven to have lied and suppressed the disease. In fact, that was the whole reason the disease got out of hand in the first place, as it's now clear the disease started spreading at least as early as December, and possibly even as early as October of last year. If China had properly not suppressed the information, the world might have been able to get a start on preparing vaccines and equipment and we could have avoided the current mess.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#18

Post by dtwest »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #3

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers. Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having…

"Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie"

"every commenter on reddit and HN were saying China was covering it up"

Stop using absolutes. There are plenty of people in the US that realize the US numbers have been suppressed by a lack of testing. There are plenty of people in the US who actually think China has handled the situation better than our own dysfunctional government.

The only absolute truth is that we don't have all of the information yet.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#19

Post by standardUser »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #3

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers. Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having…

I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but I think you're missing a key part of the picture. Any jurisdiction can lie if they want, for a while, but at a certain point this is an actual disease that causes actual illness and death. You can't hide hundreds or thousands of people dying from respiratory failure and you can't hide overwhelmed hospitals or auxiliary medical tents. Not for very long at least.

In the case of Japan, they do not appear to have high enough transmission rates to cause serious problems. I don't know if they are lying about any given fact or figure. But they are not covering up a widespread COVID-19 outbreak because we know what that type of outbreak looks like. It looks like Italy.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#20

Post by usaar333 »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #3

Popular opinion in the US regarding the integrity of various countries' coronavirus reporting is hilarious. Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence. Meanwhile, nobody is batting an eye at Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers. Hey guys, maybe China was just having literally the same organizational problems the US is having…

> Whatever China says must ALWAYS be a lie, on the other hand, the US numbers are not "suppressed," it's just incompetence.

Well, this jibes with reality.

I could care less about actual case counts - few countries are close to having the capacity to test everyone so who cares.

What is a huge problem with China is the death statistics. Looking at Lombardy with 6k+ deaths with the outbreak not yet peaked, am I really supposed to believe that only 2.5k died in Wuhan (similar population)? The CFR outside Hubei is ridiculously low - only 1 death out of 1200 cases in Zhejiang (!)?

During China's outbreak, there were additionally lots of accusations of case data being completely made up (insufficient variance in daily numbers) and looking at basically every other country's quite noisy reports today, that was almost certainly true.

The implications are pretty vast: China's reporting actually made the disease seem less urgent than it really was. Perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved had they been more transparent.

Post reply on HN