Post#1559 » by chefo » Fri Mar 27, 2020 3:19 pm
I'm with coldfish--the Chinese numbers are pure and utter rubbish:
1.) They changed the methodology several times, at some points excluding patients that showed no symptoms, then including them, then excluding them again... they changed how they counted so many times, the odds are, the final numbers are pure BS.
2.) There was a guy who ran the math the first month the infection was spreading and was almost 99% certain that either: a.) they are goal-seeking the reported number in excel or b.) the reported number is purely a function of how many people they can test in a day. If you remember, at one point the Chinese sent the army and police and told people to stay home because the hospitals were over capacity already. And if they caught you outside with symptoms, they sent you to one of the new makeshift 'hospitals', which were more detention facilities that had bare minimums of actual medical equipment. So, people stayed home, even when sick, and never got to a hospital because if they caught you before you got there, off you were to a place where if you didn't have it already, you'd definitely get it.
3.) The Chinese donated hundreds of thousands of test kits to multiple countries in Europe. Other countries bought much more; so, here's what's the feedback on the Chinese tests is--utter, unusable rubbish. The Czechs said they were getting 80% false negatives. The Spanish, 70%. Both are pissed off because a test with that kind of error rate is more dangerous than not taking a test at all, because you're releasing sick people back into the population. There were stories that Chinese doctors stopped using tests because they were so inaccurate, and instead started doing X-rays, where and when available, because you could see the pneumonia in the lungs clearly, or blood tests. But you can't screen that many people that way.
So, if I had to guess, the Chinese probably had 3-4 times as many infected, at the minimum, as reported. Deaths, who knows. And that was with riot police quarantining entire neighborhoods where there were cases. As in nobody leaves, period. At the peak, they had 700M people under quarantine for weeks.
In the USA, the measures are nowhere near as draconian... yet. The US made the same mistake the Chinese did early on--when they had a large outbreak, they let 5M citizens spread out from Wuhan for the Chinese New Year--this is where the rest of the world got it from. Same with NY--they probably have many more cases than reported, but they let hundreds of thousands of people from the most affected counties flee upstate, to NJ, NC and FL. Since I'm in FL--the reports were there were 90 full flights a day arriving to FL from NY every day for weeks, trying to escape. That's 20K+ people a day. The FL governor asked them to self-quarantine... to which the people interviewed upon arrival responded exactly how you would expect--FuOFF.
