My Take | Lies, damned lies, and statistics about China’s Covid-19 death toll
- Beijing has been accused of lying or manipulating Covid death statistics; the same can be said about some of its fiercest critics, however impressive their academic or scientific credentials
In recent weeks, several mainstream British publications have resurrected the old lab leak theory about the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. But what I find most interesting is another allegation that periodically resurfaces about China having vastly under-reported its Covid death toll.
The current interest starts with The Economist news magazine, which has released an intriguing machine learning program using big data and artificial intelligence to estimate excess deaths on top of the official death tolls from more than 110 countries and territories. The data, at least as it is currently presented on the publication’s webpage, doesn’t include China and Vietnam any more, two communist countries that do not release weekly and monthly statistics, but claim successes in containing the pandemic since the early stages of the outbreak in contrast to many Western countries.
Using the magazine’s estimates, researchers at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) claimed in an October article that the actual death toll in China is in excess of 600,000. Beijing currently claims a figure of 4,600-plus deaths.
Writing a three-part series in Forbes this month, George Calhoun, a professor specialising in quantitative finance at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New York, does even better by claiming the actual death toll is 1.7 million.
“The 800-to-1 ratio of US-to-Chinese mortality rates is a statistical, medical, biological, political and economic impossibility,” he wrote in the article, titled “Beijing Is Intentionally under-reporting China’s Covid Death Rate”, in which he equates under-reporting with lying.
But why was it impossible, when Americans had Donald Trump as president who denied the outbreak was a threat and pronounced it would disappear quickly on its own in the early months of its wildfire spread across the United States in 2020?
Calhoun continued: “China is another story. Its official statistics understate the Chinese Covid death rate by 17,000 per cent (according to The Economist model).