Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports • Hacker News Board

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#111

Post by justicezyx » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

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…

Funny that a lot of my Chinese friends and relatives in mainland China, now believe that US and many western government deliberately not carrying out tests to manipulate the numbers. They believe US etc are heading to a much worse situations than China's because of the government's incompetence, and intention to not appear incompetent.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#112

Post by zaroth » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #20

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 s…

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

Indeed, the total positive test count tells you more about changes in your testing capacity and testing criteria than it tells you about the infected population. I suppose it’s helpful in establishing the lower bound, but with no error bars on the possible upper bound.

Testing a statistically valid random sample of the population would be neither difficult or expensive. Running these tests every few days across every major metropolitan areas would be extremely useful data to report the current active infection rates.

This is useful even without an antibody test, but of course much more useful with an antibody test, because then you know not just active infection percentages but total infected percentages.

I can’t begin to speculate why this data is either not being collected or not being made available.

Death rate is somewhat useful but very lagging and also limited by not knowing the true IFR.

The only other proxy we have for guessing the total infection rate in a population is the percentage of positive tests. In NY there are districts which have 50% of tests coming back positive, which is so high as to be almost unbelievable. If that data is correct and at all indicative of the general population, it is, counter-intuitively, extremely good news.

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#113

Post by jariel » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

maallooc wrote: post #49

fatjokes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main issue is that the Internet ( especially reddit, and to a lesser extent, HN) is just not a good place for nuanced discussion. China = totalitarian = bad. Any good results are either by luck or a lie. USA = democracy = good. Any bad results are due to incompetence or Trump/Hillary (depending on your leanings). Plenty of people exist in the gray area, but they're not going to be upvoted. Any post in sup…

> Mass surveillance network Citation needed. Live traffic feeds are common here in the US[1] and other countries. [1] https://transportation.arlingtonva.us/live-traffic-cameras/

"> Mass surveillance network

Citation needed."

Are you kidding?

China's mass surveillance and censorship network is pervasive, all-encompassing, widely publicized, and an intrinsic aspect of their state apparatus.

It's not even remotely comparable to 'license plate monitoring' in scale, scope, politicization, repercussions.

This level of relativistic rhetoric is anti-intellectual.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#114

Post by wnevets » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

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…

> Japan's ridiculously and obviously doctored numbers.

Japan is notorious for faking numbers to save face like their murder rate [0] but americans never seem to doubt them. Very odd.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-09-fg-autop...

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#115

Post by pas » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #20

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 s…

What was the average age in Wuhan?

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#116

Post by Etheryte » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

reustle wrote: post #23

The team behind https://covid19japan.com fights with this nonsense every day. We're open ears to improvements, and are playing with ways to possibly automate bits. Our GitHub: https://github.com/reustle/covid19japan/

Out of curiosity, how would you compare your work with that of Johns Hopkins[1]? Your numbers for Japan seem fairly similar to theirs.

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#117

Post by jariel » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

bigpumpkin wrote: post #110

jariel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iceland as of March 30 has done 16K tests. Which is 45K/million people (4.5% of their entire pop), they have 6.6% infection rate. [1] Hubei population is 60M. So they'd have to do 2.7 Million tests to have the same degree of testing at Iceland. Even with an excessive lockdown, it seems that just on this issue alone, China's numbers look really quite wrong. That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and a…

"Even with an excessive lockdown, it seems that just on this issue alone, China's numbers look really quite wrong." So you are saying that countries and regions that are under-testing relative to Iceland all have numbers that are wrong? "That there was a breakout in other parts of the country and almost no deaths look very suspicious." That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country…

"are saying that countries and regions that are under-testing relative to Iceland all have numbers that are wrong?"

No, I'm saying that Iceland's numbers are strong, that they compare remotely well with most other nations (ie more testing, lower rate of infection), all of which, when taking together, make China's numbers look fabricated.

"That is what you don't get, there was never an outbreak in the rest of the country outside of Hubei."

3000 is an enormous number of cases, tantamount to a 'major outbreak'.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#118

Post by rfoo » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

viklove wrote: post #89

GuB-42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China locked down Wuhan much earlier than Italy did. And they did it harder. Totalitarian states have an advantage in situations like that. The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate. Case fatality rates go from less than 1% to more than 10%. In France, on the official website where they give the numbers, it is clearly written "we don't test everyone, the actual number…

China has a long, long history of suppressing access to information though. Not just in reporting false data, but also in limiting the press from investigating issues themselves. Are you honestly saying that Japan and the US have a comparable history? > And don't tell me that anything after January was China's fault. It is not like governments around the world didn't know what happened there. Both are possible, and b…

> Are you honestly saying that Japan and the US have a comparable history?

This is exactly the point of parent comment: people are simply repeating the same narrative based on "the history" as if we are still in cold war and it is impossible to know what really happened in China, while this is no longer true.

Surely the situation is not ideal, in that you still need hours to read between lines and investigate, China must improve on this, but the virus just showed us one thing: being dismissive about anything coming out of China may lead to a global disaster. We should either try to understand, or cut ties with China.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#119

Post by malandrew » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #79

usaar333 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

China locked down Wuhan much earlier than Italy did. And they did it harder. Totalitarian states have an advantage in situations like that. The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate. Case fatality rates go from less than 1% to more than 10%. In France, on the official website where they give the numbers, it is clearly written "we don't test everyone, the actual number…

> The numbers are probably not accurate, but there is no place where the numbers are accurate.

There's a huge difference between accuracy and unadulterated deception. If the numbers are off by 10%, you can claim it's inaccurate, but if the numbers are off by a lot more, it starts moving into deception territory. Right now, assuming the stories about urns being delivered to funeral homes are accurate, it sounds like numbers might be off my 2x or more. That's deception.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#120

Post by viklove » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #109

viklove wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're reporting 2.5k deaths in Wuhan, while most estimates and other sources put it closer to 20k+. A factor of 10 isn't much of a change?

Everything I've seen matches up with the Chinese data (when adjusting for test coverage for mild symptom patients). Where are you seeing this 10x higher number?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wuhan-residents-dismiss-...

> Wuhan residents are increasingly skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s reported coronavirus death count of approximately 2,500 deaths in the city to date, with most people believing the actual numbers is at least 40,000

https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-covid-19-death-toll-may-tens-...

> Some Wuhan residents estimate that the coronavirus death toll could be 26,000, based on the amount of urns being delivered and distributed across the city. Citizens on Chinese social media have said that seven Wuhan funeral homes will likely distribute 3,500 urns per day on average from March 23 to April 4, which marks Qing Ming, the traditional tomb-sweeping festival. By that estimate, 42,000 urns would be given out in the 12-day period.

Just a few sources, you can find many others if you look though.