Thread by @phl43

Unfortunately, this piece will only strengthen the myth that China engaged in massive and systematic fudging of COVID-19 data, when if you read it carefully it shows no such thing and doesn't tell us anything important that we didn't already know. 1/n

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1333530775367671813

In particular, when the tweet says that China underreported COVID-19 numbers, what the article shows is just that, as there weren't enough tests, the authorities at times only reported cases that had been laboratory-confirmed by PCR but not cases identified by symptoms. 2/n

This is not new, I already discussed this at length in my essay back in September. We have known for *months* that the definition of a case used by the authorities changed several times, which affected the numbers. 3/n quillette.com/2020/09/06/the…

As I also noted at the time, it's particularly stupid to accuse China of fudging the numbers because it didn't always report cases that hadn't been laboratory-confirmed, when it was literally government policy in France to only test people *with severe symptoms*. 4/n

France and most other countries could also have identified cases by symptoms if they had wanted to, but they didn't even bother to, yet no one is accusing them of deliberately hiding the extent of the epidemic... 5/n

When the discrepancy between documents can't be explained by the definition of case used, it only bears on a few dozens of cases. Perhaps some local officials lied, but do you seriously think the central government gave a shit if Hubei reported 83 or 115 cases on March 7? 6/n

This is obviously either the result of inconsequential lies at the local level or, even more likely in my opinion, just reporting issues as there has been in *every* country. Nobody would interpret this kind of discrepancy as proof of a cover-up anywhere else... 7/n

This document actually supports my argument that the April 17 update of the death toll in Hubei was not a sign that China had fudged the numbers but just that it had been unable to identify every victim during the outbreak, so they had to go back and revise the number later. 8/n

If you wanted to argue that China deliberately hid the extent of the epidemic, you would actually find significantly more ammunition in the paper I cited in my Quillette piece about the effects of the changes in case definition used by the authorities during the outbreak. 9/n

Indeed, compared to the document leaked to CNN (which only shows discrepancies of a few thousand cases at most), this paper can be used to argue that if the authorities had consistently used a more liberal case definition, the number of cases would have been far higher. 10/n

Of course, I don't think there is a good case that, if the authorities didn't consistently use this more liberal definition, it was to hide the extent of the epidemic. My point is that you can make a better case for this view with that paper which was published months ago! 11/n

The only thing I found really interesting is the information about the unusually strong outbreak of influenza in Hubei back in December 2019, but it's actually somewhat exculpatory for the local health authorities for not identifying the outbreak as fast as they could have. 12/n

Unfortunately, although this leak actually supports my innocuous interpretation of China's pandemic data, people will see it as proving the myth of a massive cover-up, because they are hostile to China for ideological reasons and won't read the article closely or at all... 13/13

P. S. The explanation for the March 7 discrepancy is actually even more innocuous than I thought, it's just the result of the exclusion of asymptomatic cases from the later case definition, which as I explained in Quillette we have known since February!

https://twitter.com/qin_duke/status/1333566337466175491