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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the course of disease progression could be unpredictable, with patients who intially seemed to not have too harsh a case of the disease taking sudden turns for the worse after days or even a week of mild symptoms. 10% of patients having abnormal initial symptoms would also make control of the disease a lot harder if 10% of people escape your screens.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-patien...

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Honestly, given the precedent—China lied to the WHO about SARS (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars )—I am baffled the WHO isn't sending a commission to monitor deaths at hospitals or how many bodies they burn at crematoriums.

There are unverified anonymous reports that 2 crematoriums alone are burning 2-4x more deaths than officially reported in the whole country, and a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital.

Unless you have a commission with feet on the ground, you can't verify or trust what China is reporting.

A mission of WHO representatives has finally been approved.

"...Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said a team of international experts has been assembled, with the goal of sending the first members of the team to China by early next week. He said he is hoping officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be part of the mission." https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/804130735/whos-tedros-china-h...

>a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital.

I believe you mean this:

https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342

Discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_wo...

I would take it with a grain of salt but I agree that we should have little trust into the official reports from China, their track record is pretty bad and the government control over all news and discussions end up generating wild theories that basically can't be entirely proven or disproven.

The death of Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower doctor and subsequent censoring of online discussions about the way he was treated by the authorities are also not helping:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-...

It's the 9th in China, right? Someone on Reddit¹ has accurately predicted what China will report 4 days ago, following a quadratic.

¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_...

China was refusing a great deal of outside help and input until very recently.

The WHO and CDC have been trying to send people for weeks, and China has been refusing. Only today did they finally agree to let a committee from the WHO come to the country.

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