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Comment by thomasz | Hacker News Reader

Underreporting of infections leads to a overestimated mortality rate, underreporting of deaths leads to an underestimed mortality rate.

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If you underreporting deaths without underreporting infections doesn't work. You can underreport deaths, sure. But you have to consider the underreporting of cases as well. And all these cases have bias towards being less severe. Also, the underreporting of infections is kind of systematic. So in order to increase mortality by underreporting both, infections and deaths, the mortality rate of unreported cases has to be higher than the rate for reported cases. Which is unlikely, severe cases have a tendency to show up at hospitals.

So unless you believe authorities are getting with hiding hundreds of deaths at hospitals being under international scrutiny, while simultaneously hiding the fact that dead people pile up at their homes, this theory seems kind of unlikely. Especially since international numbers outside of mainland China are more or less in line.

I dunno if you’ve seen any of the undercover videos from the hospitals? It’s entirely possible there are hundreds of deaths that haven’t been recorded. Many deaths are being recorded with viral pneumonia as death as they don’t have enough test kits to verify and are therefore not attributed to this coronavirus.

Undercover videos. Played to much Plague Inc. lately? As long as numbers from the epicenter in Wuhan don't deviate to much from international WHO numbers I will not go by "it is possible that...". I don't argue the situation in Wuhan is horrible. But taking some individual cases from area hit worst and build some BS theories out of that, going against every expert opinion out there, is just conspiracy theory shit. And spreading panic.

Panic is - when your "independent" media, repeats propaganda nonsense word for word from chinese state media?

Test your information against samples from people with relations to ground-truth. Then you can panic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5VGPYtbTk8&t=739s

Source being confirmed? Put into context?

But hey, you want to panic, go for it. But do it for yourself. Because now the "independent" media, the "propaganda" and the WHO numbers are more or less the same.

The WHO numbers are the CCP numbers. Foreign nationals are not allowed in to confirm.

So all the youtubers arw able to counter proof them with videos people in other countries, without any relevant medical expertise, are analysing. Great. Now tell me, how exactly are the youtubers and people on Twitter getting the "true" numbers if China is censoring everything? And why do you refuse to accept that the Chinese figures do align pretty well with numbers from other countries? Or do the Chinese and the WHO conspire with all other governments as well to keep the "truth" hidden?

I'm not taking either side, only saying its a possibility. Given how egregious figures and "facts" from the CCP have been previously I trust them less than most. They made their reputation so they have to live with it.

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