No, number of cases is a bad metric. Deaths is far more accurate. I don't trust their numbers, but if you assume deaths are at least within an order of magnitude, it's clear they did better than any major western country.
Rather than pointing fingers at China we should point at our own governments and ask how with months of warning watching this unfold in China, we were caught completely unprepared and on the back foot? Every single country. It's a truly shameful performance that has cost us big time in deaths and lost economic output.
In the end, western countries are indeed responsible for their own well being, but China did everything they can to block information from going out.
To know the true severity of the virus, you had to rely on leaked information. Doctors were silenced and journalists arrested, and social media censored.
Taiwan sent their own researchers in December, when only rumors were out. This is what western countries should have done.
> In early February China and the WHO was criticising countries for imposing travel restrictions
Because the WHO does not generally condone travel restrictions. Based on research on influenza pandemics, the WHO (and much of the epidemiology community) believe that travel restrictions are largely ineffective at stopping highly contagious, airborne diseases like influenza (and now CoVID-19).
Beyond that, the entire framework of international health cooperation is set up to discourage travel restrictions. The International Health Regulations of 2005 state that any travel restrictions must be explicitly justified with scientific evidence, and periodically reviewed, and should be negotiated with the country that is on the receiving end of the restrictions.
> China did everything they can to block information from going out.
Except for issuing an official alert within days of discovering the first cases, releasing the genome, and stating that person-to-person transmission was a possibility. Even if one missed all that, shutting down a province of over 50 million people should have been a massive giveaway.
> To know the true severity of the virus, you had to rely on leaked information. Doctors were silenced and journalists arrested, and social media censored.
I'm not trying to resort to hyperbole to make my point, but how is this not considered Biological Warfare by the CCP?
I'm being sincere, whether deliberate or by accident they ended up using their citizens as a (possible) vector of infection in Hong Kong--a country they have had ongoing political strife and used overt violence against--while maintaining and withholding information of its infectious nature to the rest of the World, and censoring or outright disappear'ing Citizen journalists or Physicians on the mainland who tried to share that information in the process. Which then overwhelmed Hong Kong's medical system by keeping the borders open, despite local opposition from the medical professionals as well as the Citizenry for reasons only Lam's administration could rationalize, one that risked the lives of the over worked medical professionals who were just trying to cope [4] with the influx of patients.
All while censoring the Internet for possible related incidents for those who tried to research the topic on their own
Even now Xi/CCP are trying to stonewall the investigation [1] and even threatening Australia with a boycott [2] for their calls for the probe.
And now with the findings of the Five Eyes dossier [3], which has to be approached and treated with a healthy level of skepticism, it is coinciding with the events the CCP took and has taken in the past to curtail anything it deems undesirable.
If anything this underscores why a Free Internet, uncesonrable by any Nation-State(s) is a matter of Life or Death and should be taken as serious as any other critical form of infrastructure and move away form its current monetized Panopticon model at all costs. And I'm not just referring to the one behind the Great Firewall, either.
I don’t trust deaths as well coming from China. There has been some interesting research into sudden changes in number of mobile subscribers in China suggesting it was much, much worse.
Although it has been bad, parts of Europe has not been that bad. Germany, Norway, Denmark and maybe others have had very low numbers of deaths with much less impact on the population than China. Also of course New Zealand have done very well.
Sure we should ask our governments to do more, but this issue is because of China. They create the conditions for Coronaviruses and they are extremely unhelpful in fighting them.
I remember the mobile subscriber numbers, but it doesn't look like any other data points have corroborated that story (no changes in electric bills, other utilites, etc.)
Plus the China numbers match Italy and elsewhere. I doubt their real numbers are that much off from their official released numbers. If they were, we'd see it around the world by now.
That is based on China's own numbers. I have been following this since early januari and there are leaked videos of corpses in hospital hallways and body bags stacked like garbage in vans, while officially there were only "hundreds of deaths". No one believed the official numbers at that time.
And yet it appears manifestly to be the case, no?