• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    60,000 just isn’t a realistic number of deaths on that scale.

    Maybe, but a number several orders of magnitude larger is also hard to believe. The true number could be higher, just like it probably is in every country, but a cover up of that scale would be hard to achieve. At most I can believe half a million i.e. about one order of magnitude.

    • TRexBear [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      I mean believe what you want because we’re never actually going to know for sure, but if I have to stake a number I’m going with academic studies over vibes.

      And there’s no “coverup”, there’s just noone counting. I’m not saying the PRC have maliciously hidden their numbers, I think they’ve just deliberately made the choice to not know. It’s not in anyone’s interest to investigate because that might imply that opening up was the wrong decision.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        Official government stats aren’t vibes.

        Also, no one counting is a coverup, same as it is in the US and every other country that isn’t properly testing to keep their numbers down.

        The scale of this coverup is just so much larger than everyone else in the world, which is what makes it hard to believe.

        • TRexBear [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          6 months ago

          You deciding that the real number can’t be more than an order of magnitude bigger than the official number is vibes. It’s completely arbitrary.

          I think it’s just an open secret, no one in China wants to talk or think about covid anymore. As we’ve seen, excess deaths stats are very high, so people are aware that more people died than usual, it’s just a lack of acknowledgement that it was because of covid because it’s easier to just sweep it all under the rug and move on. Same as everywhere really, it’s more convenient to just pretend it never happened, otherwise it implies we were all wrong to leave covid behind.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            6 months ago

            I’m deciding that the real number might be as far off the official number in China as it is in every other developed country. I don’t think there’s any developed country that has a coverup on this scale. You aren’t talking about something that is “same as everywhere really”, you’re suggesting something totally unique that applies only to China.

            • TRexBear [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              6 months ago

              Attitudes now are the same as anywhere, but China’s specific situation is unique. They went from the tightest covid restrictions in the world to “what’s covid?” practically overnight. Literally they closed testing infrastructure and let the majority of the population catch covid in the space of about 6 weeks. Other countries took years to go through the same thing, while maintaining testing and counting (to varying extents obviously) throughout.

              Again, I don’t think it’s a “coverup”, I think they legitimately don’t know the stats because they stopped testing entirely. It’s a big country, a million people can die and its not going to be noticeable on the ground, I sincerely don’t see why the Chinese and western death estimates I linked above are so implausible?

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                6 months ago

                The only way this would possibly work is if COVID testing is never done on hospitalized patients who show symptoms or none is ever done afterwards to determine cause of death, and so hundreds of thousands of people are just dying from what would essentially be unknown causes without any specific viral agent being identified. That is absolutely a coverup!