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Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

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Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#121

Post by rfoo »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #98
tensor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China's reporting in no way made it seem less urgent. The reported fatality rate hasn't significantly changed from their reports.

In December, China's influence caused the WHO -not- to report human to human transmission. This was despite the known infection of healthcare workers, and counter to the reports made from Taiwan. Human-human transmission is one of the fundamental elements used to determine the urgency of an outbreak.

Hello, would you please link us to the report made from Taiwan which reports H2H transmission in Dec 2019? My Google-fu failed me on this, thanks!

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#122

Post by malandrew »

dboreham wrote: post #107
mdpopescu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the Chinese actually counted the people dying of the flu, instead of every death where the deceased also had the virus.

It seems that if you have the virus in your body (test positive), and you die, then with a high probability the virus caused your death (since it only stays in the body for ~10 days).

Yes, but if you have comorbidities, it's easy for people to claim the cormorbidity is the cause of death.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#123

Post by wahern »

StavrosK wrote: post #71
bogomipz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Well, this jives with reality." You want "jibes" here. Jive means to talk nonsense: https://www.grammarbook.com/homonyms/jibe-jive.asp

Plus, "couldn't care less", though I'm fighting a losing fight.

Here's a good thread on the issue, with Google Ngram evidence for the original phrase (we know which one that is ;), and another post with a hypothesis, echoed in a couple of subsequent posts, for the emergence of the rephrasing: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283149/when-did-...

That rephrasing hypothesis is the best I've seen yet, but still not especially persuasive.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#124

Post by dirtyid »

keiferski wrote: post #90
tiborsaas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China is a totalitarian state that quite literally controls information; Japan and the US are not in any real sense. The US has a long history of spreading misinformation and lies too. Japan also tried to cover up its WW2 crimes. Point is, all governments want to control information to a certain degree.

As I said, this is a false equivalence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence These “information control” done by the US and China are in no way comparable and any suggestion that they are is pure whataboutism. We are discussing this on a website based in the US, where freedom of speech is more-or-less guaranteed. Try doing the same in China and see how the CCP reacts. For another example of this, consider…

The comparison is about government manufactured misinformation, not media transparency. US government absolutely puts out comparable propaganda as China.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#125

Post by Loughla »

yufeng66 wrote: post #73

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I believe that is an accurate statement, only when applied to the actions of one individual.

When speaking of the actions of corporations, governments, or groups of people working in tandem in any fashion, malice needs to be your first assumption.

Stupidity can be dealt with after you fix the problem, but malice will not only make the problem worse, but will also make dealing with the problem more difficult.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#126

Post by [deleted] »

malandrew wrote: post #119
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…

> 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 n…

[deleted]

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#127

Post by [deleted] »

hajile wrote: post #108
coliveira wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

China lied about literally EVERYTHING. Claims the first case was in December. It was [middle of November]( https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.htm... ) Other countries didn't even know there was much going on until December 30 thanks to Dr Li Wenliang [source]( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... ). He suddenly catches the disease and dies -- big coincidence in my opin…

[deleted]

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#128

Post by rfoo »

malandrew wrote: post #119
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…

> 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 n…

Maybe. But it is really hard to find an explanation on why every medical statistics (severe rate, hospitalization rate, death rate, average time in hospital, average recovery time, etc) seems to hold true and verified by other countries, and they can still fake their death count (and only death count).

On the other hand, the number of urns being delivered to funeral homes can be easily explained. For example, the urns story talks about a fact, the amount of empty urns being delivered to funeral homes exceeds death count. But selling urns is marketized and people could pick their preferred combination of style, size and price, so this can be well explained. The story then goes ahead and matches this fact-based but pointless number with "random users on social media claims 3500 urns will be delivery daily during next two weeks". I mean, that's smelly.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#129

Post by lostlogin »

maallooc wrote: post #40
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…

Who assumes Japan's numbers are honest? We all know they've been cooking their numbers for the stupid olympics. At this point all I can believe are South Korea's numbers. They have transparent government unlike China, they have tested extensively unlike the US, Italy and Spain, and their climate is similar to the US unlike Taiwan and SE Asian countries.

> and their climate is similar to the US unlike Taiwan and SE Asian countries.

Do you mean political climate? I don’t think the weather over regions that large can be generalised in any meaningful way.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#130

Post by tigermelon »

StavrosK wrote: post #92
tigermelon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I have to. "I could care less" can mean "I could (stand to) care less". As in, "The amount I could care about this is zero because it's so irrelevant, but in responding to this discussion or otherwise engaging the topic, I have exhibited a bit of care, albeit undue." For fun, I sometimes like to propose this to anyone who brings it up, but I could care less whether people say "could" or "couldn't". :) Edit: Ha…

"I could care less" could mean anything other than "I don't care completely", including "I care passionately about this, it is the thing I care most about", thus making it meaningless. If I said "I could work less", would you assume I meant "I work almost zero hours"?

True there's ambiguity there and the sentence alone really only conveys that the topic isn't one that the stater wants to focus on any further at the moment.

Generally however, I think there's some assumption or perhaps prior demonstration that implies a lack of care to start.

It's tough to describe. "I could care less what you do with your money" may come with a long understood history that not much care was given to this topic the past (i.e. we haven't discussed it before), and if we are now arguing about it because because some prior discussion escalated, I am indicating that I preferred the status quo with that statement (albeit in a way that probably doesn't defuse tensions in this particular example :).

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