The Communist Party in China is lying about Covid-19 again. This is disappointing but not surprising. After all, the Communist Party has a history of dishonesty when it comes to protecting itself from anything that might adversely affect its control of the unarmed Chinese citizens over whom it rules with a tyrannical iron fist. American media companies’ sudden rush to carry the Communist Party’s water is an abandonment of critical thought which is exposed by a simple comparison of China’s rates of infection and mortality compared to those of the rest of the world.
Assuming the U.S., like China, took no action at all to stop the spread of the virus for 42 days, one could project similar rates of infection in the U.S. In other words, if China’s timeline is overlaid onto the U.S., the United States’ Covid-19 cases should follow a similar trajectory but 42 days later. This is not the case in the United States. It is not the case in Italy either. Nor is it true in Spain, Germany, Iran, France, South Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Canada, Denmark, Australia, or Malaysia. One of these things is not like the other.
China’s rate of infection parallels that seen in all other countries with Covid-19 infections until around Feb 14th, and then effectively flatlined around Feb 21st, dates which are interesting because they mark the three weeks and one month marks, respectively, from the Communist Party’s announcement of its plans to stop the virus. Accusing a country with a population of 1.5 billion people, nearly five times as large as the U.S., of this kind of malfeasance should not be made lightly, and are not made lightly here. To understand the dishonesty of China’s Communist Party, one must simply look at the spread of Covid-19 in China and compare the spread of the virus in China to its spread in any other country in the world with confirmed cases.
Granted, estimating the spread of the virus is hard, which is why the estimates from governmental officials vary so widely. The CDC’s worst-case estimate is that 160 million to 214 million people will be infected. Even within the worst-case estimate is a huge range – the U.S. has a population of 327 million, so 160 million is about 49% of the population. 214 million is about 65%. The gap between them is 54 million people. That this variance of 54 million people exists within a single estimate (CDC’s worst-case estimate) made by the same agency on the same day should make the point plain that even experts with a lifetime of experience studying virology simply do not know how many people will be affected.
Somewhat more interesting is that the articles which repeat this “worst-case scenario” fail to provide context indicating how likely this worst-case scenario is to occur and generally also lack information about the CDC’s three other estimates, one of which, presumably, is the CDC’s best-case scenario. Even the articles that do discuss the best case scenario tend to do so in apocalyptic terms, while others suggest the best-case scenario is that market economies are so damaged by the Covid-19 virus that we finally see the ascendance of Socialism. Apparently the authors are not aware that collectivism is not only not the cure for the Covid-19 virus, it actually caused its spread and created the conditions for it to exist in the first place. After all, the virus likely originated from the “wet markets” in China because Communism keeps the Chinese people so poor that they can’t afford decent food, or the fact that it spread because China’s Communist government jailed and silenced the scientists who warned about the virus.
However difficult these estimates may be, it may be possible to work this out differently by looking at infection rates in China, Italy, and the United States. Assuming we can trust China’s numbers, as of March 23rd, 81,054 Chinese people have been infected by the Covid-19 virus, with 3,261 deaths and 72,440 recoveries. These numbers indicate a mortality rate of approximately 4%. Perhaps more relevant, however, are the rates of infection, and for that, we need a sense of scale.
Wuhan, China is a huge city, with nearly 11 million residents. For comparison, Wuhan is so large that you would need to add the entire population of Chicago to the entire population of New York City to create a U.S. city of approximately the same size. Even if one divides the total quantity of infected people in China by just the population of Wuhan, the infection rate is only 0.7% or about 1 in 145 people; and that’s the rate of infection, not mortality. Though Italy’s mortality rate of 9% is higher than China’s, this is probably due to higher numbers of elderly people in Italy and to demand medical services in outbreak areas exceeding the limited medical capacity available in those areas. Even in Italy, the rate of infection appears low relative to its national population, at 0.09%, or about one infection per 1100 people. Infection rates in the United States are even lower, with infections equivalent to about one in 11,000 people, and a mortality rate of 1.2% for those infected.
In China, one of the earliest cases reported about the Covid-19 virus occurred on December 10th, 2019. On December 31, Wuhan health officials confirmed 27 cases of illness and closed a market they believed was related to the virus’ spread. On January 13th, 2020 the first case was reported in Thailand. On January 15th, 2020, the patient who would later become the U.S.’ first Covid-19 case departed Wuhan and arrived in the United States. On January 18th, 2020, the Wuhan Health Commission announced four new cases, the same day they hosted the Wuhan Lunar New Year banquet, a mass gathering in which tens of thousands gathered for a potluck. On January 20th, the first case was announced in South Korea. One day later, the U.S. announced the United States’ first confirmed case. On January 23rd, China finally locked down Wuhan. This is important because, while China locked down Wuhan only two days after the Communist Party paper, People’s Daily, announced the Covid-19 virus, infections there started on or before December 10th, 45 days earlier.
For at least some part of this time, the Chinese Communist Party not only failed to take action to prevent the spread of the disease but actively worked to suppress information about it that would have slowed or stopped its spread. This timeline provides us with an approximate starting point for a “patient zero” in China of December 10th, 2019, and indicates that the spread of the virus there was enhanced by 45 days of the Communist Party’s malfeasance. However, analysis of this information even to forecast how rapidly the virus can spread without governmental intervention is complicated by three factors:
- The total lack of transparency on the part of the Chinese government.
- The active measures taken by the WHO and State actors since knowledge of the pandemic became publicly available.
- The reality is that countries refusing to take the pandemic seriously are not conducting widespread testing for the virus, so the number of infected populations in these countries is unknown and therefore impossible to quantify.
Based on this history and these numbers, there remain many unknowns about how deadly the virus is and how quickly it is spread, but we know one thing for certain: China’s Communist Party is lying.
The fact that, of all nations in the world with 1,000 or more confirmed cases of Covid-19, China stands alone as the only country that seems to have brought the outbreak under control, is suspicious. The fact that China began kicking out US journalists from media outlets which could have reported on any discrepancies between the Communist Party’s reported data and what’s actually happening is suspicious. The fact that China tried to hide and then denied the Covid-19 outbreak when it first arose in Wuhan, then blamed the US for it later is suspicious. Taken together, these facts are damning. China is lying about Covid-19. Again.
