Thread by @JeremyKonyndyk

Great @PeterBeinart article on how US-China antipathy under this administration has demolished scientific cooperation and likely worsened the outbreak.

A few other thoughts on China while I'm at it: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Every. Single. Time. that I or others refer to China's case numbers, or its apparent success in containing the outbreak, there is an immediate flood of tweets (bots?) calling BS on China's numbers and accusing us of being commie shills, or worse. It's insane.

No question that China badly mishandled the early phase of this outbreak. This piece gives a thorough rundown.

Their political leaders were slow to admit and act upon the danger, silencing those who tried to sound the alarm. wsj.com/articles/how-i…

Does that mean we shouldn't trust their numbers now? It certainly gives basis to want to verify, rather than take at face value.

So if there numbers were meaningfully higher than the official reports, what would we expect to see?

Well, if they were only marginally higher - i.e. light community spread - it's possible the world wouldn't notice.

But that also wouldn't be inconsistent with the official picture we have of China - that the outbreak has been brought under control and is being managed.

But if the real case numbers were meaningfully higher, it would be quite hard to hide that for long.

As we've seen in Wuhan, Italy, NYC - once cases get out of control, it becomes pretty obvious. Even in Iran, which like China tries to control public info pretty tightly.

If the official picture of China's outbreak were substantially misleading, you'd expect to see either social media reports like we were seeing from Wuhan in January, or active indications that such reports were being systematically suppressed.

So - should we take China's case numbers, and the progress they seem to portray, at face value? Perhaps not.

But is there actual evidence they're wildly inaccurate? Not that I've seen. And would it be possible to hide that if they were? Not for very long.

Much of this desire to cast doubt on China's numbers seems tied to a desire not to admit that the USG is doing far worse than they did.

We were both, due to government ineptness and political motivations to downplay risk, slow to get going.

But China, once they did being acting, did so with tremendous, albeit draconian, competence and discipline.

The USG response has been much slower, less organized, and less competent. And it shows in our case numbers, which continue to skyrocket.

Even if China's official numbers are skewed, there's no way they look as bad as ours right now. If China were handling this as terribly as the US they'd be unable to hide it. So the hard reality is that we're failing where they appear to be succeeding.

That's tough to swallow, especially for the anti-China crowd. But the longer we keep denying it - and consequently ignoring the lessons of how they've done so - the longer we'll be in this mess.

PS - Had missed this piece from a few days ago, which provides some anecdotal reports of downplaying numbers. Seems consistent with idea China may be under-reporting light community spread, but no evidence things are swinging back out of control (for now). ft.com/content/4aa352…