China’s coronavirus statistics are phony

by Richard Schulman

China’s communist government is trying to recover from the basement level to which its prestige has fallen after causing thousands of deaths worldwide and destroying a world economy in recovery from the 2008 recession. Now it seeks to worm its way back into the world’s good graces by claiming that it has found the secret to halting the virus’s spread. This — surprise! — turns out to be dictatorship Chinese style and surveilling and policing every movement of the population. China is also offering medical aid to the very countries — Iran and Italy — that it first infected through One Belt One Road “assistance.” But China’s coronavirus statistics are phony, just as its economic growth figures have long known to be.

Statisticians aren’t fooled…

We know the Beijing regime is lying because, as a Barron‘s headline puts it, “China’s Coronavirus Figures Don’t Add Up. This Never Happens With Real Data.” Barron‘s interviewed Melody Goodman, associate professor of biostatistics at New York University’s School of Global Public Health:

“I have never in my years seen an r-squared of 0.99,” Goodman says. “As a statistician, it makes me question the data.”

Real human data are never perfectly predictive when it comes to something like an epidemic, Goodman says, since there are countless ways that a person could come into contact with the virus.

For context, Goodman says a “really good” r-squared, in terms of public health data, would be a 0.7. “Anything like 0.99,” she said, “would make me think that someone is simulating data. It would mean you already know what is going to happen.”

https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-economic-data-have-always-raised-questions-its-coronavirus-numbers-do-too-51581622840

…But with lazy journalists it’s easy

On March 5th, Reuters’ correspondent in Beijing credulously reported that

Outside of Hubei, there were 17 new confirmed cases, bringing the total new infections in mainland China to 143 on Thursday, up from 139 cases a day earlier. Of the 17 new cases, 16 were imported from outside China – 11 in Gansu province, four in Beijing and one in Shanghai.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-toll/chinas-hubei-reports-no-new-coronavirus-cases-outside-city-of-wuhan-idUSKBN20T060

Clearly the Reuters correspondent won’t be expelled from China the way the more inquisitive correspondents for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post were. We know that what the Reuters correspondent reported is wrong because seven million Chinese fled disease-center Wuhan for all parts of China before the Xi regime shut down travel in and out. That had to create multiple new centers of coronavirus infection just as it had in Iran, Italy, and Spain.

We know that the official statistics of the infected and dead even from Wuhan and the surrounding province of Hubei are phony. Chinese sources inform us that China is not reporting at least two categories of Wuhan virus victims:

• those that are infected but asymptomatic;
• those who died but were never tested for coronavirus.

Both of those categories are likely huge.

Social media reports

We also have the testimony of Chinese social media, where Chinese have been posting photos of thousands of funeral urns at multiple Wuhan funeral homes. Bloomberg reports that

The long lines and stacks of ash urns greeting family members of the dead at funeral homes in Wuhan are spurring questions about the true scale of coronavirus casualties at the epicenter of the outbreak… Outside one funeral home, trucks shipped in about 2,500 urns on both Wednesday and Thursday, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin. Another picture published by Caixin showed 3,500 urns stacked on the ground inside. It’s unclear how many of the urns had been filled.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-27/stacks-of-urns-in-wuhan-prompt-new-questions-of-virus-s-toll

Gullibility of western journalists

Almost as outrageous as the lies the Xi Jinping regime is circulating — both in its official statistics and its phony Twitter accounts — is the credulity of the Western press, including the news section of the Wall Street Journal, in taking at face value the Beijing regime’s claims in bringing to a halt the virus’s spread in China, in contrast to the overwhelmed hospitals in western nations. China has also been widely publicizing its generous provision of medical assistance to western countries.

Some countries that eagerly accepted China’s offers of medical assistance were quickly disillusioned. In the Ukraine, a coronavirus response coordinator said that a center in the Odessa region “ordered thousands of coronavirus tests from China at great expense — only to receive ‘ordinary flu tests’ that had ‘nothing to do with coronavirus,'” The Atlantic reports. Its article is titled “The Problem with China’s Victory Lap.”

China’s propaganda operation — buying politicians and media in the west — has not gone unreported, witness this 2018 article in The Guardian. But China has meanwhile subverted many Twitter accounts for use in its Wuhan virus — oops, COVID-19 — propaganda. You know, the virus that the US army brought to China….