"Wuhan COVID-19 Death Toll May Be in the Tens of Thousands"

This contradicts the Chinese government's reports that the death toll in Wuhan was only about 2500.

So says Newsweek (Christina Zhao); there was an earlier article from Radio Free Asia (a U.S.-government-funded nonprofit) that gave similar estimates. (Bloomberg likewise writes, "Report of Urns Stacked at Wuhan Funeral Homes Raises Questions About the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in China.")

These are just estimates, and may well be incorrect, but I thought they were worth noting given that the government-released data may be incorrect as well.

Comments

[Sam Gompers]

Can you imagine how happy these numbers would make Pelosi and Schumer and Soros?

[Kevin Smith]

They like China's numbers being lower than ours, so these won't make them happy at all

[AmosArch]

Since their main concern seems to be attacking Trump rather than helping or coming up with innovative solutions of their own I'm not so sure about that. Especially when they criticized the very thing they're doing now as 'obstructionist' back when their guy was in office with far less pushback then Trump.

If you're so concerned about obstructionism like libs used to be I would think that now of all times would be the moment to unite together instead of caterwauling about what name the virus is called or the ethnic composition of the task force. Think of all the masks and ventilators all that hot gas and attack ads could have purchased.

[AmosArch]

I guess I misread your post and the OP...my bad

[NToJ]

Why would this make them happy?

[Sam Gompers]

I just skimmed and thought that was in America.

[Eddy]

What a tragic number of deaths!

(Also racist to use the term "Wuhan," and don't give me excuses like it's actually happening in Wuhan.)

[TwelveInchPianist]

I know. I was shocked at the amount of racism at the Taiwan News, who consistently uses the term, "Wuhan coronavirus" to refer to the virus.

[Dr. Ed]

Racism? You do know where the Taiwanese came from, don't you?

Yes, they have issues with the ChiComs, but in terms of ethnicity????

[Eddy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ73Q4DwrGM

[sam123]

Chicom repsonse: Excellent! stupid baizou shrieking about racism and virtue signaling while we keep open our exotic animal markets and promote them as traditional chinese herbal remedies.

[Eugene Volokh]

Eddy: Love the parenthetical.

[Josh R]

I'm fine with calling it the Wuhan virus. I'm not fine with calling it the China virus because that label is too close to "Chinese virus."

[Eddy]

Now that we're at it, Won Ton soup sounds too much like "wanton soup," making it sound slutty.

Definition of wanton (Entry 2 of 3)
1a: one given to self-indulgent flirtation or trifling —used especially in the phrase play the wanton
b: a lewd or lascivious person

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wanton

[PeteRR]

If they dislike China or Chinese virus, perhaps they shouldn't have insinuated or flat out propagated the idea that the virus came from the US and was delivered by the US army to Wuhan.

Donnie from Queens don't take no shit from troublemakers.

[Josh R]

I'm fine with calling out the Chinese government for their conduct, but the "Chinese virus" implies the fault lies with an ethnicity.

[ThePublius]

That's a lot of woke language nonsense. "Chinese" can mean "made in China" or "from China" just as well as it can refer to an ethnicity. It doesn't ONLY refer to an ethnicity,

Chinese: adjective
relating to China or its language, culture, or people.

[Dr. Ed]

OK, ChiCom Virus.

[Jimmy the Dane]

Imagine that the Chi-Coms lie...

[Bob from Ohio]

They literally welded apartment doors shut. They completely locked down 100 million people. They closed things like theaters for another billion.

Their numbers are like the 99% dictators always get in referendums

[Sarcastr0]

The number of commenters so eager to pivot when they thought this was an American tragedy to blaming the Dems for speculative partisan nonsense is a helluva thing.

[apedad]

Shirley, you can't be surprised.

[Sarcastr0]

I dunno - I'm an optimist.

No one was talking about how the Dems were super happy after 9-11.
But this shakes my faith that we aren't the polity now that we were then.

[TwelveInchPianist]

None of the Dems called 9-11 "a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision."

[Sarcastr0]

Not a great move by Clyburn. Also very clearly not gloating.

Anecdotes will get you anywhere you want to go.
Telling that this is where you want to go.

I thought better of you, specifically.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Hillary Clinton@HillaryClinton
·Mar 27
He did promise "America First.""
[hospital picture]
"The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases
Following a series of missteps, the nation is now the epicenter of the pandemic. " nytimes.com

Nope, no gloating

[Sarcastr0]

Did not think better of you.

Pointing out that Trump sucks does not mean you're super excited that he sucks.

[David Nieporent]

Uh, that's the exact opposite of gloating.

[Voize of Reazon]

We live in a neighborhood with lots of first-generation Chinese immigrants. Since the virus first made the news they have warned that whatever numbers the Chinese government admits to, you should believe the reality is ten times worse.

[Dr. Ed]

Imagine, hypothetically, that this was intentionally released by the ChiComs. Imagine that it was intended to create a world-wide pandemic that destroyed the existing economic order so as to permit the ChiComs to step into the vacuum afterwards.

Just speculating....

[Sarcastr0]

Stop it. China sucks, but speculating without proof is just narritivist masturbation.

Nothing wrong with a bit of indulgence, but not in public.

[PeteRR]

A more likely case than that is they had the virus, were studying it, and it broke out of containment at the virus center in Wuhan.

Not saying that it is likely, just more likely.

[Dr. Ed]

Do we or do we not know the meaning of the word "hypothetically"?

[David Nieporent]

"Speculating" is different than "making insane nonsensical shit up."

[Dan Schiavetta]

Internationally what comes out of the Chinese government's mouth has more credibility than what comes out of Trump's mouth. Just stating the obvious.

[cmcc_aus]

This "Chicom" label is getting ugly. The Chinese didn't invent communism. We know they got it from Russia, long ago. We need to put the blame where the conspiracy begins. This is the Russkie Virus.

[Eddy]

Marx was German, so it's the German Virus.

Like German Measles, only less pleasant.

[Liberty Lover]

Who/what is less pleasant, Marx of the measles? Please clarify?

[Eddy]

Marxism, the Teutonovirus.

[Dr. Ed]

ChiCom is a shortened form of "Chinese Communists" which is a distinct group from the Chinese people. A very distinct group.

We make a similar distinction in Iran.

[MatthewSlyfield]

The US annual death toll from seasonal flu is in the tens of thousands.

[Eugene Volokh]

MatthewSlyfield: I'm not sure what the significance of that is here. The population of Wuhan is 11 million, about 1/30 that of the U.S. If Wuhan had tens of thousands of extra deaths from coronavirus, that suggests coronavirus was much more dangerous there than the flu is here.

As to the possible dangers of coronavirus in the U.S., the coronavirus death counts over the last three days in the U.S. have averaged 400/day, up from 50/day a few days ago -- and the worry is that this will increase even more, to the rates seen in Italy and Spain: The daily death rate in Spain over the last three days has been 800/day, in a country that has 1/7 the population of the U.S.

This thus seems potentially on track to be much more dangerous than the seasonal flu in the U.S., though of course we can't know for sure. Or am I misunderstanding your point?

[Stephen Lathrop]

Because many have declared pandemic response to be analogous to war, it seems reasonable to offer war-related casualty context. Right now, the coronavirus in the U.S. is killing many more victims per week than the enemy killed during the Tet Offensive, the deadliest weeks of the Vietnam war.

It is not obvious that the eventual pandemic death toll nation-wide will not go higher than America's total combat deaths in World War II. Even the Trump administration just acknowledged the possibility of deaths numbered at about two-thirds of U.S. combat deaths. That estimate was said to be based on efficient response to contain the pandemic.

If the pandemic were to swamp utterly the ability to provide responsive medical care, and defeat public health measures to contain it, the consequent death toll could notably exceed all of America's combat deaths in all of its wars. That last result may be unlikely, but it would be foolish to presume now that it is outlandish.

[Dr. Ed]

Is butchering chicken permitted on street corners in your city? Public defalcation? Leaking sewer lines in apartment buildings?

All of that exists in Wuhan.

[ThePublius]

"Public defalcation?" That's funny.

[Dr. Ed]

Damn spellchecker...

[ThePublius]

There is controversy regarding the number of deaths annually attributed to seasonal flu by the CDC. The CDC apparently conflate pneumonia deaths with seasonal flu deaths, the direct cause of death of the latter probably being much lower. The CDC methodology is model-based, and their death attributions vary widely - dramatically - as in giving a range of "12,000 to 61,000 deaths per year." Some who have dug into this in detail assert that the death rate directly attributable to influenza is much, much lower.

[David Nieporent]

True, though issues with data apply to all diseases, including coronavirus. For example, is a death attributed to coronavirus if someone has the textbook symptoms but dies before being tested? If someone dies of coronavirus and another condition, which is it attributed to?

And what about someone who is not infected, has a stroke, and dies because there are no ICU beds/ventilators available because they are all occupied with coronavirus victims?

[Andrew P]

Chinese propaganda dramatically understating the deaths may have been the most damaging of all. It looks like China released numbers large enough to be semi-believable, without being so large as to scare the world. This made us far too complacent. We know anecdotally from people with contacts in Wuhan that enormous numbers died in their homes and were taken straight to the incinerator. We see the pictures of many tens of thousands of urns being delivered. But we don't know the truth about what happened, as only the Communist Party knows that.

If 100K die in NYC (as I expect), we will know for a fact that China's numbers were pure propaganda. NYC is about the same size and population as Wuhan.

[Dr. Ed]

And how many died as the result of the Weimar Republic?
If we have 30% unemployment & hyperinflation?