A report from China, from someone who actually lives there

[George.]

I have been told that people who are actually there should be believed:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/o...-new-year.html

The situation quickly worsened nationwide. Patients swamped clinics and emergency rooms; hospitals and nursing homes struggled to stock medications. The wave reached my hometown in eastern China in the final days of December. I rushed home, worried sick about my 85-year-old grandmother.

... All the beds were taken at overcrowded local hospitals, so we cared for her at home.

...


Images of overwhelmed hospitals and crematories, along with obituaries, flooded Chinese social media for weeks. My neighbor in Beijing lost her father, grandmother and uncle in the current outbreak. The crush of patients and long waits for ambulances or care at chaotic hospitals all hampered their treatment.

“I trusted the government too much,” she told me. “They lied to us.”

Looking at the math, China should be around the middle of this million-death wave right about now. When it is over, the government will crow about the economic recovery and never mention the deaths and suffering. Eventually the statisticians will figure out the true death toll from excess mortality figures, but the CCP will deny it. Compared to the Great Leap Forward it is nothing.

[George Jung]

Yeah, saw that this morning - and 'immediately' thought of our good friend, and his 'personal' observations......


I'm betting it's all just propaganda, likely from someone living in Jersey.

[George.]

Are you saying HR lives in Jersey?

[George Jung]

Our intrepid china correspondent loves to rant on, and on, and on.... about 'bodies piled up in the streets'. I've no idea - but from this suspiciously chinese sounding writer in the OP, it certainly appears the crematoriums have been busy.

Gosh. Maybe that's important.

[George.]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...estimates.html

While a precise accounting is impossible, epidemiologists have been working to piece together the mystery of the outbreak that accelerated in December. Four separate academic teams have converged on broadly similar estimates: China’s Covid wave may have killed between a million and 1.5 million people.

...

China is, after all, the only country in the world that faced its first major wave of infections without making any attempt to slow it, resulting in what Dr. Cowling conjectured was the fastest spread of a respiratory pandemic virus in modern history.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

The Old China Hand’s Excuse:

​China is so big and so diverse that anything anyone says about it is true of something or someone somewhere.

Examples:

Chinese people don’t put milk in their tea / except in Inner Mongolia.

Chinese people don’t eat sheep / street food in Beijing

Palm fringed tropical beaches / Hainan

Etc…

[Ralphie Boy]

George. has an endless supply of stupid self-contradictory crap that says things like


One second it was a draconian lockup, the next there was no attempt to slow it down.

Since I stayed home for three weeks in February of 2019, I'd say this was horse****. I even have a few reminders of that experience stashed on the hard drive but no use putting them here, bigots believe what they want to believe. Flat earth, sun rotates around the earth, disease is caused by miasma, north vietnamese were shooting at the maddox, iran airliner was attacking the valiant Vincennes, iraqi soldiers dumped preemie babies on the floor, weapons of mass destruction, if vietnam falls then all of southeast asia goes commie, francis gary powers was on a weather recon flight and somehow ended up over the wrong continent, all of this reported by jayson blair in beijing by the nyt.

Good stuff. Reputable. Reliable. Can set your watch by them, gray lady's got their sheets together. [/FONT][/COLOR]

more whattaboutism

[Ralphie Boy]

It's gone far beyond ridiculous now tho, beyond silly, just stupid. One second it was an authoritarian draconian lockup, next second no attempts to even slow the virus. Can they try to at least get their stories straight ?

I was mystified about why all this garbage ? It's outright lies. And then an idea ... the only logical explanation I can think of is, the beltway is having its second childhood wet dream over the days when it was the white hat US versus the black hat soviets. Good versus evil (and of course we're the good ones). Shining city on the hill vs despotic hellhole of authoritarian torture. Let's go back to 1950 !

It's a pretty dream, right ? And senile Joe, snoring away in his dotage while the pentagon jacks off in the corner, would just love to return to those happy days. In fact it suits the entire beltway perfectly, so that's what they have decided to peddle. It's really sh1t on a shingle but they are selling it as prime rib, with really good horseradish and maybe peach ice cream for dessert.

Too bad the reality is, wizard's got no clothes. This is going to end just as badly as all the rest of their harebrained schemes of the past fifty years. Probably worse.

The mystery is why, after fifty years of this garbage, the public keeps running right up to the trough for another big serving. This stuff tastes bad, rots the teeth and gives you cancer. Shouldn't eat it.

Saving for posterity

[Keith Wilson]

Oy; here we go again.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Getting much too serious round here.

Some views of contemporary China, with and without masks:

https://www.tiktok.com/@gz970704

or

https://instagram.com/georgina_zhong...d=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

[George Jung]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...estimates.html

Likely 1.5 million dead - since dropping 'lockdown'. And counting.

[LeeG]

Are you guys trolling Davies?

[Canoeyawl]

Stupid. Likely three people in Nebraska have an IQ over ten.


Lying worthless assholes, unless of course that's what you want to believe and facts make no difference.

Everyone has to to believe something...
So, 3 people in Nebraska?
The good Dr. and Warren Buffet come to mind, that leaves one more. Who could it be?

Perhaps a Senator... ‘Remember that time that China started a big, global pandemic that created the worst public health crisis in over a century and brought the economy to its knees?’”

[George Jung]

How Deadly Was China’s Covid Wave?

By James Glanz, Mara Hvistendahl and Agnes Chang Feb. 15, 2023

Two months after China ended “zero Covid,” rough estimates suggest that between 1 and 1.5 million people died — far more than the official count.

China’s official count


2.5 million

83,150 deaths

Model based on Shanghai outbreak

1.6 million deaths

LOW ESTIMATE

HIGH ESTIMATE

Estimate using travel patterns

970,000 deaths

Estimate using recent testing data

1.5 million deaths

Estimate based on U.S. death rates

1.1 million deaths





After China relaxed the world’s most stringent Covid-19 restrictions in December, the virus exploded. Hints of the surge were everywhere: Hospitals turned away patients. Crematories were overwhelmed with bodies. A wave of top scholars died.
But China’s official Covid death toll for the entire pandemic remains strikingly low: 83,150 people as of Feb. 9. That number is a vast undercount, researchers believe, in part because it only includes infected people who died in hospitals, excluding anyone who died at home.

[George Jung]

While a precise accounting is impossible, epidemiologists have been working to piece together the mystery of the outbreak that accelerated in December. Four separate academic teams have converged on broadly similar estimates: China’s Covid wave may have killed between a million and 1.5 million people.
All of the researchers consulted by The New York Times cautioned that without reliable data from China, the estimates should be understood as informed guesses, with significant uncertainty — although the estimates fit the evidence far better than the official figures do.
The question of how many people died has enormous political relevance for the ruling Communist Party. Early in the pandemic, China’s harsh lockdowns largely kept the coronavirus at bay. Xi Jinping, the top leader, has portrayed that earlier success as evidence of China’s superiority over the West, a claim that would be hard to maintain with a high death toll.
The differences between China’s figures and researchers’ estimates are dramatic. The official numbers would give China the lowest death rate per capita of any major country over the entirety of the pandemic. But at the estimated levels of mortality, China would already have surpassed official rates of death in many Asian countries that never clamped down as long or as aggressively.


At the same time, China would rank below Germany, Italy, the United States and other countries where outbreaks accelerated before vaccines became available.
Two of the estimates were in papers published in academic journals or posted for peer review, while two other analyses were shared by epidemiologists in response to queries from The Times.
Researchers used a variety of approaches to gauge how many people may have been infected and — a crucial question — how effective China’s homegrown vaccines were at preventing death. Some drew on how the virus behaved in past outbreaks in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where data was more reliable, and a few used detailed computer models to simulate the epidemic.
Still others turned to official sampling data, based on China’s systematic testing of hundreds of thousands of people, to develop a model that estimated deaths to be far beyond the government's tally.
“If the data say what we think they say, this was an explosive wave,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of biology and statistics at the University of Texas at Austin.

[George Jung]

Why official data underrepresents China’s outbreak

83,150 deaths

China’s official count on Feb. 9


2.5 million





China has a narrow definition of what counts as a Covid-19 death.
As crematories were inundated in December, Chinese officials only announced deaths that involved respiratory failure, leaving out infected people who died of liver, kidney or cardiac failure — an omission that was met with widespread skepticism. In mid-January, the government started releasing data on other deaths, but the figures are still incomplete.
Most glaringly, they exclude people who died outside hospitals. While it is impossible to know exactly how many deaths at home have been missed, from 2018 to 2020, only around one-fifth of all deaths in China occurred in hospitals.
The official figure is “certainly an underreport of all Covid deaths,” said Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies mortality in China. “There’s no question about that.”
While government data shows that China has doubled the number of intensive care beds since 2020, hospitals were still overloaded during the recent surge. Experts believe hospital deaths probably still account for only a small proportion of total deaths.
“With such a rapid spread, the I.C.U. beds definitely were not enough to cope with the peak,” said Shengjie Lai, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton.


China reported few deaths until the recent outbreak

New reported deaths by day

Peak deaths reported on Jan. 4.

3,000

2,000

1,000

Wuhan outbreak

Shanghai outbreak

2020

2021

2022

2023




Source: Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention; Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Note: Death figures are seven-day trailing averages. Figures after Dec. 8, 2022, are approximate and drawn from a chart published by the Chinese C.D.C., as Chinese officials no longer publish exact daily values. Data as of Jan. 30.
The number of people infected is unknown, which further complicates understanding the reach of the epidemic. After two years of widespread testing and quarantining, the Chinese government in December shuttered once-ubiquitous testing centers and made the reporting of self-test results voluntary.
Other data is missing. At least nine cities in different parts of China, including Beijing, have stopped publishing quarterly cremation totals.

[George Jung]

An earlier estimate, based on the Shanghai outbreak

1.6 million deaths

2.5 million

600,000

2.3 million

Assuming full vaccine protection

Assuming lower vaccine efficacy





One estimate, published last year by scientists largely at Fudan University in Shanghai, used a previous Omicron outbreak in Shanghai to estimate how quickly the virus might spread in mainland China.
The virus spread through the city early last year, before lockdowns and other social restrictions had a chance to slow it down. The researchers used data from that period to inform a disease model that estimated how a future outbreak might play out if strict control measures were removed.
The researchers made a number of assumptions: how many I.C.U. beds would be available, when a lockdown would end and how quickly people would receive additional vaccines.
But if anything, the estimate might be conservative, said Bruce Y. Lee, an infectious disease modeler at City University of New York who was not involved in the research.
The study assumed an outbreak during the spring and summer, when more people are outdoors, meaning the rate of transmission would be relatively slow. But the virus took off in China in the winter.
“The evidence is that this virus is demonstrating seasonality,” Dr. Lee said. “If you had to guess, you would expect the reproduction rate to increase during the winter.”
The focus of the paper was on how treatment, vaccination and other measures might be able to slow the wave and reduce the toll. But the work was unwavering in its ultimate conclusion: Ending the “zero Covid” policy was likely to overwhelm the health care system, producing an estimated 1.6 million deaths.

[George Jung]

A more recent estimate, based on travel patterns

970,000 deaths


2.5 million

800,000

1.1 million

80% of simulation results fall within these bounds





The toll of China’s outbreak would also have been influenced by the age, and the movements, of those infected.
In a more recent paper, three scientists at the University of Hong Kong estimated deaths by looking at how many people in each age group died during previous outbreaks in other countries, and adjusting the data for China’s demographics. Several researchers made similar calculations.
The Hong Kong researchers also modeled how increased travel around China’s Lunar New Year, the busiest travel period of the year, would help to spread the virus. They estimated that the surge might kill about 970,000 people by the end of January.
Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist who was not involved in the work, said the degree to which holiday travel affected transmission would be hard to pin down precisely. But he said the approach was sound in principle.
“I think they’ve done pretty well,” Dr. Hanage said.







A third team of researchers shared another estimate with The Times, using information that became available after the worst of the outbreak had passed.
The researchers — Dr. Meyers at the University of Texas and Zhanwei Du, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong — found a unique way into another crucial question: How many people were infected? Even after China eliminated its mass testing program, health officials continued to test hundreds of thousands of people from around the country between mid-December and mid-January in an effort to track infection rates, according to a report from the Chinese C.D.C.
Based on that data, they inferred that 90 percent of the population was infected in little more than a month.
While the figure is high, epidemiologists who were not involved with the project said such a rate was plausible. And in January, a leading government epidemiologist said on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that 80 percent of the population had been infected. Some European companies’ operations in China saw infection rates of 90 percent among their employees in December, Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Times in an interview.
When the researchers incorporated the timing of the outbreak, estimated fatality rates and the effect of vaccinations into a statistical model, they found that the outbreak may have killed about 1.5 million people. Given the uncertainties — like how quickly the vaccines took effect — a plausible range for the estimate was 1.2 to 1.7 million deaths, Dr. Meyers said.
Numerous factors could affect how accurately the sampling program in China gauged the true number of infections, Dr. Meyers cautioned. She called those figures “highly uncertain” and pointed out that any inaccuracies would influence the estimate.

[George Jung]

A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on fatality rates in the United States

1.1 million deaths


2.5 million

900,000

1.4 million

Assuming 600 million people were infected

Assuming 900 million people were infected





Even the simplest calculations by disease modelers found that the number of deaths was very likely to be an order of magnitude higher than the official tally.
Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, started with a simple assumption, that the fatality rate for people infected in China was roughly the same as it presently is in the United States: 0.15 percent, or about 1 in 650 people.
Various factors could balance out, Dr. Shaman said. China uses different vaccines than the U.S. But China’s population had been less exposed to the virus by the time the outbreak hit, making it more susceptible.
At a fatality rate similar to America’s, if 40 to 65 percent of China’s population was infected — a conservative estimate — then between 900,000 and 1.4 million people may have died, he said.
Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, arrived at a similar death toll by considering only the 82 million people in China aged 60 and older who were unvaccinated or had received fewer than three vaccine doses as of late November. If 80 percent of that group were infected, he would expect more than a million of them to have died, given their limited immunity and exposure to the virus, he told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China last week.
China is, after all, the only country in the world that faced its first major wave of infections without making any attempt to slow it, resulting in what Dr. Cowling conjectured was the fastest spread of a respiratory pandemic virus in modern history.

[George Jung]

It's not really a troll, when it's real info. And note the date.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

For what it may be worth, I talk to Chinese colleagues in Shanghai, Dalian and Hong Kong every day on the phone and nobody has mentioned Covid-19 since before Spring Festival. So I don’t think they are dying like flies. A lot of people have had it and had a few days off, though.

[George Jung]

The 'charts' are current for what they're evaluating - and 'the look' is a bit broader than a few phone calls to colleagues talking business.

But the takeaway is - the death rate from china's approach is likely remarkably higher than they have reported.

[George.]

For what it may be worth, I talk to Chinese colleagues in Shanghai, Dalian and Hong Kong every day on the phone and nobody has mentioned Covid-19 since before Spring Festival. So I don’t think they are dying like flies. A lot of people have had it and had a few days off, though.

1. In such big cities the wave hit in December and January.

2. I am sure there are a lot of things that people in China avoid mentioning to foreigners on the phone.

[Nicholas Carey]

A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on fatality rates in the United States

Even the simplest calculations by disease modelers found that the number of deaths was very likely to be an order of magnitude higher than the official tally.

Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, started with a simple assumption, that the fatality rate for people infected in China was roughly the same as it presently is in the United States: 0.15 percent, or about 1 in 650 people.

Various factors could balance out, Dr. Shaman said. China uses different vaccines than the U.S. But China’s population had been less exposed to the virus by the time the outbreak hit, making it more susceptible.

At a fatality rate similar to America’s, if 40 to 65 percent of China’s population was infected — a conservative estimate — then between 900,000 and 1.4 million people may have died, he said.

Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, arrived at a similar death toll by considering only the 82 million people in China aged 60 and older who were unvaccinated or had received fewer than three vaccine doses as of late November. If 80 percent of that group were infected, he would expect more than a million of them to have died, given their limited immunity and exposure to the virus, he told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China last week.

China is, after all, the only country in the world that faced its first major wave of infections without making any attempt to slow it, resulting in what Dr. Cowling conjectured was the fastest spread of a respiratory pandemic virus in modern history.

Bear in mind that China doesn't use the Moderna/Pfizer/Novavax/J+J mRNA vaccines. They use their own, which is apparently, far less effective. Also, half of China's population lives in rural areas, and there is pretty sizeable disparity in healthcare outcomes between urban and rural healthcare. Those two things lead me to believe that China's mortality rate for this is likely rather higher than the USA mortality rate might otherwise suggest.

[edited to note]

This article, https://healthpolicy-watch.news/will...le-population/ says:

While 87% of Chinese people are vaccinated with two shots of the local homologous vaccines, Sinopharm and Sinovac-Coronavac, only 55% are boosted, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Older Chinese who are more vulnerable to serious illness have been particularly resistant to boosters.

But China’s vaccines are only about 60% effective against severe infection in comparison to the over 90% protection offered by mRNA vaccines, and experts recommend a third booster shot to raise their level of protection.

[George Jung]

Yes. The authors of the NYTimes piece were using really conservative factors - and so, the death rate might be even remarkably higher. Why no bodies piled high? Crematoriums, if we're to believe the writers.

[Canoeyawl]

Remember the time the US started the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed fifty million people and brought the world to its knees ?

.

Nope that was well before my time...

It appears to have killed as much as 5% of the world's population though which would be well over 50 million. Still only #2 behind the "Black Death"

My Grandfather who was working troop ships across the Atlantic did remember it and had comments about how many soldiers died on each voyage.
Ever wonder why it was called the "Spanish flu" even though the first documented case was in Kansas?
Probably not the Senator from Nebraska

[George Jung]

Ah, yes - Ben Sasse. On one hand - likely 'the best' of our Nebr. representatives; on the other - a really low bar. Gosh. Unbelievable who 'we' vote in. But in my defense - it wasn't me!

Of course, now he's the prez of University of Florida. I have to wonder if he'll be knocking heads with DeSatan, or if they'll become best buds.

[johnw]

India's official report of covid deaths is about half a million. The World Health Organization in May 2022 thought it was more like 4.7 million. I'm pretty sure American covid deaths are underreported to some extent as well.

If China gets off with less than 2 million covid deaths, that would be quite an accomplishment. I doubt that will happen.

[Ted Hoppe]

04234745-C3BE-4E06-9085-B1BCEEE26CF8.jpg
Fixed...

311F1041-6690-435E-BEC7-209EB89B77D1.jpg

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I think the NYT’s estimates are reasonable, maybe on the low side. But that doesn’t mean that China is experiencing something like the Black Death; plainly, from the international trade figures, which cannot be easily altered, the Chinese economy is recovering strongly, and that wouldn’t be happening if people were dying all over the place.

[George.]

the Chinese economy is recovering strongly, and that wouldn’t be happening if people were dying all over the place.

Yes it would, once the wave is done with urban areas where the factories are. That was the whole point of just letting it rip.

The deaths are mostly among people our age, not among workers in their prime.

[George.]

Too bad Chinese people have a different view of their country than knowitall brazilians.

How would you even know that, if there are no polls or freedom of speech?

... a bunch of guys who encourage the singsong girls to overpower their guest to verify whether the "large foreigner dick" is a myth...

Sounds like a bunch of misoginist a$$holes.

While we're here tho, I am certain you can illuminate Ms Meng's identity for us ? Documentation, please ?

Sure. As soon as you provide same for yourself. How do we even know if HRDavies

exists and lives in China

[George Jung]

Still betting it's New Jersey. Fat kid in his mothers basement.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

“…seems like there's a whole lot of things you are sure of, but none of them correspond to reality. The first questions they asked M. le C-B were "how old are you ? how much money do you make ? are you married/have children ?" They discuss their small wives with maybe a proviso to not mention it to the big wife. They took him to ktv and got him drunk off his ass, guaranteed, and we won't even go there about what happened next. The biggest complaint most korea people have about chinese is they are too noisy, unrestrained, rambunctious, loud. You think a bunch of guys who encourage the singsong girls to overpower their guest to verify whether the "large foreigner dick" is a myth, you believe they are going to be afraid to say whether they got a virus or not ?…”

Close, but being a colleague they already knew what I got paid and how old I was, my wife visited me in China and moved to join me with our one son after a year or so,



and having made friends early and been tipped off by them (ban bei, pengyou!) I was hard to drink under the table.

I could have had a lot more fun on the night girl front, but I was playing a long game. I even resisted the blatant attempt to set me up with the prettiest girl in the office by making her my PA. She has gone on to a brilliant career of her own in banking. When I left China the senior V-P called me in, gave me rather a nice present, and said “And now I suppose you are going to write a book about us?”

”That, Sir, is one thing that I will never do!” I replied, and a couple of years later, my having not written the book by the first lao wai in the C suite of an SOE, they decided that they could trust me, they made me an offer that I could easily have refused, but didn’t refuse, to rejoin them, in London, and I’m still there.

I was careful to avoid having too much to do with the marketing side of the company…

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Sure. As soon as you provide same for yourself. How do we even know if HRDavies


exists and lives in China


He does. Do you suppose I didn’t check him out? He’s real.