In Wuhan, doctors knew the truth. They were told to keep quiet
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
It should not be surprising the chinese government, notoriously shy of public data, put this stuff under an interdict. It also should not be a surprise that somebody somwehere in officialdom was compiling the stats, because there are two kinds of lies, both bad:
The first kind is the one you tell everyone else. The consequences here go to things between you, or in them. They certainly caused every other economy harm by not sharing data.
The second kind is the lies you tell yourself. A government which doesn't have the real figures cannot govern effectively. Its massively counter productive to understate mortality in the field, in the crisis, inside your planning engine. Somebody needed to know. Maybe it went to the Chinese Academy of sciences and got whited out of the report, but the data went "inside" the system. At the point you tell hospitals to stop publishing mortality statistics, if you also tell them to stop reporting them, you've really lost control of the situation.
And in any event, given time, it comes out. The surplus deaths figures, and future population demographics are really hard to hide.
We banned entry from China, but permitted US visitors free reign until we went into deep lockdown, because we didn't think to check if the virus was wild in the USA.
We allowed cruise ships packed with infected people to dock, and offload and go into the community.
We unlocked the door too soon, before we'd finished primary vaccination.
There's plenty of blame to go around without focussing on China.
Those cruise ship issues were totally predictable and could have been prevented. But sadly NSW was run by corrupt idiots.
The only state to take it very seriously was also the state with the premiere that got the most abuse because of it. (VIC and Andrews)
I'm an Aussie living in Norway and we did a mostly fantastic job here. Up until the election, the government changed, and the new gov decided to just do the opposite of everything the previous one did, and open up. The cases spiked and for the first time since the start we had real problems. Vaccine rollouts changed, everything went backwards..
Interesting Sweden, who had one of the worst COVID responses, had a change of government too... They decided to start taking it seriously and we had this situation where prior to this, Sweden always had surging numbers, and Norway didn't.. to trading places.
Western Australia surely - full state border lockdown from the get go up until near 80% of the state population had two vaccinations.
W.Australia had near zero cases "in the wild" - the 'outbreaks' such as they were centred about border quarantine issues, ships, quarantine hotels etc and caused relatively (wrt the rest of the world) few hospitalisations and limited mask wearing curfews.
For the bulk of the two year period W.Australia was maskless and COVID free.
That is simply not true. Sweden has one of the lowest excess mortality of the pandemic of all developed countries. Only New Zealand and Denmark appear to have done better. Norway performed similarly, and Finland somewhat worse.
Excess mortality estimates are model-dependent, but almost all models tell the same story.
Lab was sponsored by US.