CNN has breaking news about COVID in China. It’s not really breaking news. It’s what been backlogged and hidden now that the 2020 election is over. Our main economic rival has been lying about their COVID cases. I, for one, am shocked. An authoritarian regime with a terrible human rights record would lie about the number of infections they suffered this year. A nation that jailed or disappeared reporters and vloggers who were reporting on the outbreak did this? A nation that silenced and strong-armed doctors on the frontlines of this emerging pandemic did this? I mean, this is just a day that ends in “y.” Leave it to CNN to give the benefit of the doubt to a government that used tanks to run over pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square to be trustworthy about a virus. China’s incompetence at containing this pathogen led to the situation we’re in now.
For months, we’ve known the number of deaths and cases far exceeded what they were saying on official records. This isn’t news. In fact, it’s sort of sad that they even published this piece. We all knew it. Even the most anti-Trump voter probably knows that China was cooking the numbers…by a lot (via CNN):
Nearly half a million residents in the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus first emerged may have been infected with Covid-19 -- almost 10 times its official number of confirmed cases, according to a study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The study used a sample of 34,000 people in the general population in Wuhan -- the original epicenter of the pandemic -- and other cities in Hubei province, as well as Beijing, Shanghai, and the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Sichuan and Liaoning to estimate Covid-19 infection rates.
The researchers found an antibody prevalence rate of 4.43% for Covid-19 among residents in Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people. As of Sunday, Wuhan had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.
[…]
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the study points to a problem of underreporting in infections during the height of the outbreak in Wuhan, partly due to the chaos at the time and a failure to include asymptomatic cases in the official count of confirmed cases.
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In January and February, patients with fevers flooded Wuhan's hospitals, which lacked the manpower, testing kits and medical resources to diagnose and treat them. Instead, many were told to go home and self-isolate -- some ended up infecting other family members, while others died at home without being recorded in the Covid-19 death tolls.
But the liberal media said for months prior to Election Day that the US was the hardest hit, a COVID wasteland. Oh right, that was prior to Election Day. Now, it’s ‘hey look, China’s infection rates might be higher.’ You can’t gaslight when you’re piss poor at doing your job to begin with, fellas. Oh, and let’s not forget this classic line, “the 76-day lockdown [in Wuhan] came at a huge cost to residents…nevertheless, the sweeping measures have been heralded by the Chinese government as having allowed the country to turn a corner in its fight against the outbreak.”
Yeah, because authoritarian regimes will promote stories that make them look bad. Of course, the Chinese government is going to say that. We know what those incinerators were doing in the city. The words to best describe this CNN piece about COVID in Wuhan: welcome to the party, pal.
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