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Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

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Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#171

Post by downerending »

reaperducer wrote: post #32
guardiangod wrote: post #14

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 pres…

HTML? Isn't that something you write by hand? In a good number of very large (Fortune 100) companies, yes. Even in large tech companies. Just as mechanical lathes and nail guns didn't put carpenters out of business, there are plenty of web sites that benefit from the attention of human hands, not just trusting the latest fad framework to concatenate several thousand dependencies pulled from random GitHub repositories…

Having looked at a lot of machine-generated HTML, "by hand" is still looking pretty good.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#172

Post by krackers »

astrobe_ wrote: post #104
guardiangod wrote: post #14

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 pres…

Incidentally, I always though that in animes it is often a big deal for a character to catch "a cold" because plot ; unless their cold are actually more aggressive than western colds (or flues)? I wonder more and more which one it is.

>to catch "a cold"

Not to mention that mere exposure to inclement weather is enough to result in its onset, germ theory be damned

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#173

Post by j_koreth »

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…

A source on recent press expulsions in China.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/business/media/china-expe...

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#174

Post by stevenwoo »

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/

Do yall know if how many deaths were from critical cases, I'm assuming some deaths were determined post mortem from people who did not receive critical care. The UK published numbers showing 50% survival rate for people who had to get admitted to the ICU so a surface reading of the stats on the page might indicated a 5 % survival rate in Japan or no relationship at all depending upon interpretation.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#175

Post by nemetroid »

My hypothesis is that the "with no symptoms" and "with symptoms" items actually do include deaths.

> Remember to not include death, because this is a quasi-hierarchy. The table tempts you to, but it's excluded. (The quasi-nature is because it is under the PCR tested positive umbrella on level 2.) So what about integrating level 3?

> That's simple. You don't. Because no matter how hard you try, the numbers won't add up. (e.g. Give it a try - you'll end up with 129 != 131 and 1147 != 1191. We'll need one of these numbers later.) Level 4 adds up though, so the plot thickens.

Note, however, that (131 - 129) + (1191 - 1147) = 46, i.e. the number of deaths.

So if you adjust the 131 and 1191 figures to match their subdivision, everything would sum up correctly, including the top level (pcr_tested_positive), which would then include deaths.

This would imply that 2 people without symptoms died, and 44 people with symptoms did.

Taking a guess, "deaths" used to be two separate columns: one under "with no symptoms" (2 deaths), and one under "with symptoms" (44 deaths). It was then decided that "deaths" should be its own top-level item, and someone decided that this was the best way to achieve that goal.

I can't find a way to make sense of the daily increases though, so this might be entirely wrong.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#176

Post by DebtDeflation »

hilbertseries wrote: post #46
standardUser wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I strongly suspect that Japan is maliciously incompetent and a lot of dead Japanese will be the result." When? Japan has had this coronavirus a lot longer than most places. If we expected the transmission rate to explode, we would have expected it to happen already, and we would be seeing the consequences.

It looks Tokyo is starting to have an out break https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-tokyo-olymp...

"What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that, if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame."

I feel like we're watching Chernobyl play out in real time here.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#177

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

watwut wrote: post #170
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And half the population dislike Trump. And they can criticise him freely. And do. But as you ignored the last question (Answer: China is a big country, not Fox News), here's a new one for you. Which Chinese guy named Li Wenliang tried to warn people the shit was hitting the fan and then got seriously slapped down for it because reality wasn't what president Xi wanted to hear? And then died of exactly what he was tryi…

American doctor was fired for talking about lack of materials for doctors and nurses. I understand what you are talking about, but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January. And there was that report from secret service that was known by goverment and became public later. The situation being bad in China was not opaque or unknown. They dis not actually managed to make it much of secret. And r…

Well, as you seem to struggle with that one too, the clue's in the question - the guy's name was Li Wenliang!

Anyway

> American doctor was fired for talking about lack of materials for doctors and nurses

Link please. Then we'll see if it's so, and if so, if there's any comparison.

> but there was enough data public about China having trouble in January

Indeed there was. I used that info to prepare BTW. And it only got out because the CCP could not suppress it totally. So "the CCP failed to suppress..." is not the same as "the CCP published...". Indeed, you said it better than I did: "They di[d] not actually managed to make it much of secret"

Wenliang had more balls and brains than the entire CCP put together. I salute the gent.

> And right now, "Chinese are lying"

Not The Chinese. Not Wenliang and those like him. The CCP and their mouthpieces.

> It just can't possibly be that America has taken lead in infected

The US fucked up monumentally and will pay the price. That much the US recognises, and all of it will do in just a very few weeks.

BTW could you translate that letter for us?

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#178

Post by robocat »

cossray wrote: post #87
intpx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont know if their data is bogus or not but I can tell you that japan has engineered their society with infection control in mind. if people are even the least bit under the weather they put on a face mask. Many people who directly interface with large numbers of people wear them all the time (clerks, train station employees etc). hygiene is very important. many more doors are automatic than in most of the world. a…

The automatic doors might be the quiet heroes here. Given that hands have proved to be among the predominant avenues for the virus spread, I have been keen to monitor where my hands are put into use here in Japan. The only door knobs I have to turn on a normal day routine are my apartment and office doors. Any other place: from convenient stores, ATMs to buildings, automatic doors are quietly but effectively protecti…

> Given that hands have proved to be among the predominant avenues for the virus spread

Do you have any information to back that up?

I have seen respected epidemiologists saying hands are a minor vector, that Covid19 is a respiratory disease with respiration being the dominant transmission vector.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#179

Post by viklove »

rfoo wrote: post #136
viklove wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

The two links seems to point to the same source, and: > Trucks dropped off roughly 2,500 urns on Wednesday and again on Thursday local time to one of the eight local funeral homes, a driver told Chinese media outlet Caixin. The news site also published another photo showing 3,500 urns stacked inside the facility. The number of urns that arrived in that one funeral home was far greater than the city's official overall…

> some random Wuhan residents playing numbers on social network

Yeah, when the government hides information and imprisons journalists, that's all we're left with, isn't it?

They're not the same source, by the way. They're multiple different community sources reporting the same information.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#180

Post by ksk »

dang wrote: post #155
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…

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. There's substantive material to discuss here, but you've unfortunately poured firestarter over it (e.g. snark and flamey rhetoric). When people do this, the results are predictable and dismal—especially when the material is flammable to begin with. That's why the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to post this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelin…

Unfortunately for you, people have been using neutral language to start daily flame-wars and getting away with it.
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