Talk:COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China

Wiki Education assignment: EDT 251 - Research Skills and Strategies

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 8 March 2022 and 13 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Yuxiang Dou (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Jiaoyan Zhou.

Statistics are not realistic

This page claims that around 5,000 people have died from COVID-19 in China. This is a death rate that is about .1% the death rate in the United States when Wuhan is the epicenter of the pandemic and is the central transportation hub of China. I know that these are the statistics that the US media reports but people have to use common sense here and question what the actual death rate is. A discussion section should be added to the page. 50.230.201.134 (talk) 17:53, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

You might be interested to read about the Chinese government response to COVID-19, which has been very different from the US government response. As a result, transmission has been much less widespread in China than in the US. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 20:26, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

It is not physically possible for transmission to be lower in China than it is in the United States, let alone 1,000 times lower. China is more densely populated than the United States and Wuhan is the central transportation hub of China. Furthermore, Wuhan is the epicenter of the pandemic and there were already infections in every single county in the United States in April 2020, which was before newer variants even existed. 50.230.201.134 (talk) 00:41, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

China's zero-COVID policy limited death significantly. As you now see, with the policy lifted in China, cases and deaths are many multiples higher. Footballfan3570 (talk) 22:07, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Lies 2601:18C:CE7F:4100:2C9E:F2B7:8E87:D52E (talk) 14:02, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Of course it's possible for the transmission rates to vary. That's the very reason we have a Centers for Disease Control -- because diseases can be controlled. China had a vastly different response to the virus. Instead of in the US, where the government did nothing but use worthless words saying "stay at home" while every American completely ignored it and traveled to 20 different stores every day looking for the vital human necessity known as "toilet paper" (which was only invented in 1857); the Chinese actually enforced a lockdown, literally nailing the doors shut of people who wouldn't comply. Instead of having their citizens venture outside, the government delivered necessities to everyone locked down so they could stay locked down. The Chinese tested EVERY citizen of multiple cities MULTIPLE times to nail down who was infected, they contact traced those who tested positive, and they quarantined the infected plus everybody they came into contact with and everybody they came into contact with. The rest of the world had no medically intelligent pandemic response, it was essentially, "Do largely nothing and hope that God makes it all go away." The rest of the world was just pissing on a raging forest fire while China was isolating the sparks that start the fire and stamping them out. Every flare-up was identified, contained, and let to burn out in safe quarantine. China implemented Zero COVID, with "Zero" actually meaning "zero" and the infected being identified and prevented from infecting others. 2601:19E:4280:5853:F40E:E4AC:7DD6:768D (talk) 11:32, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Suspected Cases column

The Suspected Cases column says "January 2022" instead of "January 2023", the month the citedsource was published. This was provably a typo. Baccherini (talk) 03:20, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Actual Death Toll

Why is the figure of 122,170 the only figure given? Several papers have been published in the past year or two which provide a much higher estimated:

Using time-series data on all-cause mortality among senior members of CAE, we estimated that nearly a million excess deaths occurred in December 2022–January 2023 among urban dwellers in Mainland China. The observed death count among senior CAE members was not compatible with the low death rate based on official statistics. As has occurred elsewhere in the world, the true impact of COVID-19 on mortality in Mainland China was much higher than what was officially documented. [1]

We estimate that the ensuing wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections caused 1.41 million deaths in China during December 2022–February 2023, substantially higher than that reported through official channels.[2]

Cremation figures released and then quickly withdrawn by authorities in China’s Zhejiang province appear to confirm widespread doubts about the government’s official pandemic death count, and lend support to international forecasts which predicted roughly 1.5 million deaths from covid in the weeks after China abandoned its zero covid policy last December.[3]

For example, a calibrated model27 based on the 2022 Omicron outbreak in Shanghai to project COVID-19 outcome in the absence of non-pharmaceutical interventions suggests about 1.6 million deaths (1.10 deaths per 1000 inhabitants) over a 6-month period.[4]

98.34.76.212 (talk) 03:48, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Remove western paternalism

Please change "The Chinese central government's reported death statistics only include cases in which COVID-19 directly caused respiratory failure, which led to skepticism by health experts of the government's total death count"

to "The Chinese central government's reported death statistics only include cases in which COVID-19 directly caused respiratory failure, which is a different standard than some other countries use."

First off, "Heath experts" is undefined. Who are these "health experts," and why are we quoting these specific ones? Also, why is their "skepticism" relevant? Who set them as the "objective" measure by which all things must be counted? China is allowed to set their own criteria and it's just as valid as anyone else's. This seems to be written from the perspective that white people set the default with everybody else's standard being judged in relation to it. That's biased. Everybody dies. China's decision to count the deaths of very old and/or unhealthy people who all die of *something* as a death caused by "old" or "unhealthy" rather than the specific "thing" that tipped them over the edge is a sensible way to categorize things. If they died today of the flu vs tomorrow of falling and breaking a hip or the day after that of a heart attack, does it really matter from a public policy perspective? Fatties are going to die of being fat and old people are going to die of being old regardless of what the government does about any contributing factors. So it really makes more sense to call a fattie who died at 25 from COVID as having died from being fat rather than dying of COVID if they wouldn't have died if they had been a healthy 25 year old. The thing that made them unhealthy is what killed them. i.e., if COVID didn't specifically kill them by scarring their lungs to the point that it would kill a healthy person, it wasn't COVID that actually killed them, it was their underlying weakness. China should be allowed to use this criteria without comments from the western peanut gallery being treated as being authoritative. Even adding the "which is a different standard than some other countries use" is a Western bias since the statement "The Chinese central government's reported death statistics only include cases in which COVID-19 directly caused respiratory failure" should be allowed to stand on its own, but I realize that white people have to squeeze their supremacist perspective in somehow. 2601:19E:4280:5853:F40E:E4AC:7DD6:768D (talk) 12:07, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

 Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. Bunnypranav (talk) 16:32, 6 September 2024 (UTC)