I thought I would add to my previous post with a quick update after the media collectively failed with fact checking, with news items such as Coronavirus deaths hit highest daily toll when it almost certainly didn't. Below are the two counts of cases in China 12 hours apart on my phone, the first at 7:37am this morning and the second at 7:51pm this evening. The red numbers shows the number of confirmed cases, the yellow are the suspected cases, the black is the fatalities and the green are the recoveries. The news people can read numbers and they have indeed risen dramatically in the reported total number of reported cases and deaths. But in this case, it's probably not the case that the cases dramatically shot up at all.
When I received the Hubei numbers, there was a lengthy preamble before the numbers, which is different to all the other reports through the Chinese media. Even though I'm fluent enough with my reading, I'm also quite impatient so to see this textual obstruction annoyed me so I flicked down and the numbers seemed from another planet, enough to send me back to the preamble.
Hubei has changed its way of counting cases. It has been shown that the antigen test they use for the virus is unreliable and having both it and the CT scan as the necessary two-step confirmation has been flawed. So they have brought in a clinical approach focussing on symptoms and thus they reclassified a whole bunch of people, and is it turns out, a whole bunch of deaths. To be honest, I'd believe that there is probably a lot of death accounting yet to go in Hubei. Allow me to be crude: I presume they're not bringing corpses from the countryside and putting them through a CT scanner. The initial torrent of fatalities were probably incinerated in fear and due to a lack of space before there was a credible way to test. A clinical determination might have back counted the likely cases.
So don't be alarmed. The TVNZ news was funny in that it both claimed yesterday to be a deadly day, yet also recognised that they had changed the way they were counting them. I haven't heard of other provinces re-evaluating their cases, but if others follow suit there might be another bump up in numbers, without it corresponding to a worsening of the situation.
The funny thing is that there will be items about how officials may be messing with the numbers. They may be fake, but if you're going to take the numbers seriously, it's important to know what they mean.
Under the official news radar, there is still a lot of disturbing news and videos out there. I'll try and cover it in my next blog.
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