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[scriver]

Ah, then I understand.

[Reelya]

The domestic violence fears are because people are cooped up because of coronavirus, so that is coronavirus news.

Recently there were more conspiracy theories about Wuhan.

The latest one shows a photo of a pallet of urns being delivered, with reportedly 5000 of them, and asking why they'd need so many urns. It's actually very poor "evidence" of anything. Many people in China are cremated, and Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. Flu deaths this winter still exceed coronavirus deaths by a large margin. That many urns would last a Chinese city the size of Wuhan just a few weeks at this time of year, even without coronavirus.

(EDIT: death rate in china is 7.261 per 1000 residents, so for Wuhan population, 11.08 million, 80452 deaths per year. Cremation rate in China is 48.50%, so they'd go through 39000 urns per year. 5000 urns is enough for 6 weeks out of the year, even without a virus. Additionally, the city's been locked down for 2 months so may not have gotten shipments for a while. Maybe they were running out for that reason alone. Additionally, they may just be cremating more people than normal in Wuhan instead of burial due to precautions. That alone would double the city's demand for urns to 5000 every 3 weeks, even for normal deaths).

In other words, we need better evidence than that, and the fact that that's the best evidence they've got actually suggests there really isn't any good solid evidence. China cremates 4.5 million people a year. That's a lot of urns. Maybe there's something in it, but they need better evidence than the fact that a shipment of empty urns turned up.

[King Zultan]

Nearly 1 out of 3 Greenlanders have been the victim of sexual abuse in their youth.

What the fuck is wrong with Greenland, why are there that many pedophiles in one place?

[mko]

Additionally, they may just be cremating more people than normal in Wuhan instead of burial due to precautions.

Also, in Italy (probably also in Wuhan) gatherings were banned. This included burials. So people were more likely to cremate, to wait till gathering ban lifted. This way people are allowed to have standard ceremomy with friends/family.

This is part of the reason for overloading crematoria in Italy.

The government in Greenland has prohibited the sale of alcohol in it's capital Nuuk until the 15th of april, to protect children against domestic violence and abuse, and to reduce the number of alcohol poisoning cases.

And in case that someone thinks that this is an overreaction

    Pay days are the worst time for the children of Tasiilaq, officials say. With their salaries or social benefits in hand, many adults tend to drink and parents become too inebriated to look after their children, officials say. That’s when an already high rate of sexual abuse rises, according to a police study published last week […]

    So on the last Friday of every month, officials open a sports hall in the district as a shelter to keep children away from sexual abuse.

    “Children were abused by their stepfathers, cousins and by the neighbor looking after them as the parents were on a bender,” Naasunnguaq Ignatiussen Streymoy, the mother of a sexual abuse victim and an anti-abuse activist, told Weekendavisen, a newsweekly, in an article published on Friday about the crisis.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/world/europe/greenland-sexual-abuse-tasiilaq-denmark.html

Nearly 1 out of 3 Greenlanders have been the victim of sexual abuse in their youth.

What the fuck is wrong with Greenland, why are there that many pedophiles in one place?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As with most social issues answer is not clear, but there are some strong candidates. And it is not just massive sexual abuse, and it is worse than 1/3.

"Greenland’s suicide rate is 83 per year per 100,000, almost three times higher than any other country in the world."

"Child sexual abuse rates in Greenland range from 37% in Nuuk to 46% in East Greenland. As far as I can tell, you are understanding those numbers correctly – almost half of children in Greenland are sexually abused."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/05/suicide-hotspots-of-the-world/

Most damning of all, Greenland’s high suicide rates are a recent phenomenon. In 1971, the rate was 4. I didn’t forget a zero there. Fifty years ago, Greenland had one of the lowest suicide rates in the world. But by 1990, it had reached 120 (it’s since come down a little bit). What happened in those twenty years?

You would think limiting it to such a short time period would make things easy. It isn’t. There are two main theories: social alienation, and alcohol.

There is definitely a lot of social alienation. For centuries, the Inuit hunted seals in traditional villages. At some point the Danish government decided that was unacceptably backwards and resettled them in cities, especially the capital of Nuuk. This didn’t go well.

One counterargument to this story is that Nuuk has the lowest suicide rate in Greenland, and the more remote the village, the worse the suicide crisis. Maybe you could argue that everywhere was modernized and disrupted and alienated but at least a big city has some interesting stuff to do. This would kind of match the American experience, where it’s small towns in West Virginia that are getting hit by the opioid crisis and deaths of despair.

Another counterargument is that all Native American communities suffered a lot of displacement and alienation and modernization, but none of them suffered the same suicide spike as the Inuit. Sources disagree on the exact Native American suicide rate in the US, but it isn’t unusually high; the CDC numbers say it is slightly below the rate for non-Hispanic whites. Canadian First Nations suicide rates are elevated, but still only a third or so of Inuit levels. Maybe Inuits suffered stronger relocation pressures than other native peoples because of their Arctic environment? Or maybe every native group suffered a suicide spike, but Native Americans and Canadians have adjusted by now and their suicide rates have come back down? I’m not sure.

The other theory about Greenland is alcohol. Alcohol consumption in Greenland skyrocketed around the same time suicide did, reached levels that temporarily made Greenland by far the most alcoholic country in the world – then started declining around the same time suicide did. This seems to be a pattern when hunter-gatherers with no genetic or cultural resistance encounter alcohol for the first time – Native Americans in the 1700s got up to some crazy stuff.

So you take some hunter-gatherers who have never encountered alcohol before, stick them in the northernmost place in the world, and throw cheap Danish alcohol at them at the exact moment their communities are being uprooted and destroyed forever, and you get…well, you get this:



By 1980, Greenland was the most alcoholic country in the world, drinking an average of 22 liters of pure alcohol per capita per year (Russia is 15). It doesn’t look like this was responsible social drinking either. Take the most deranged binge drinking in the worst college fraternity in the world, multiply it by a thousand, and that was Greenland during much of the late 20th century.

But this can’t be the whole story. Alcohol consumption in Greenland has since dropped to the same level as Denmark and other European countries. But the suicide rate is still ten times higher. Why? Maybe the moderate quantities are hiding deeply dysfunctional drinking patterns with lots of binging and addiction.

Or maybe it’s something worse. Child sexual abuse rates in Greenland range from 37% in Nuuk to 46% in East Greenland. As far as I can tell, you are understanding those numbers correctly – almost half of children in Greenland are sexually abused. In Nunavut, the numbers are 52% of women and 22% of men suffering “severe” childhood sexual abuse. The New York Times sets a disturbingly vivid scene:

    Pay days are the worst time for the children of Tasiilaq, officials say. With their salaries or social benefits in hand, many adults tend to drink and parents become too inebriated to look after their children, officials say. That’s when an already high rate of sexual abuse rises, according to a police study published last week […]

    So on the last Friday of every month, officials open a sports hall in the district as a shelter to keep children away from sexual abuse.

    “Children were abused by their stepfathers, cousins and by the neighbor looking after them as the parents were on a bender,” Naasunnguaq Ignatiussen Streymoy, the mother of a sexual abuse victim and an anti-abuse activist, told Weekendavisen, a newsweekly, in an article published on Friday about the crisis.”

Correlation is not causation. Maybe the same dysfunction or social alienation or alcoholism that causes the sexual abuse separately causes the suicides. But maybe the obvious answer is true, and the sexual abuse contributes to the mental health problems that eventually lead to suicide. Maybe a generation of staggeringly high alcoholism led to staggeringly high child abuse, and a generation later those children are still committing suicide at staggeringly high rates.

[TamerVirus]

Flu deaths this winter still exceed coronavirus deaths by a large margin.

Do you know how many people died of the flu in China? Officially?
Source 1
Source 2
2019 - over 144 in January
2018 - 144
2017 - 41
2016 - 56
This peer-reviewed paper using official influenza data between 2004-2015 indicated that out of 1173640 recorded influenza cases, 107 resulted in death.

So by official Chinese data, Coronavirus has killed 3300 people, more than the flu did in the past 15 years

[mko]

Flu deaths this winter still exceed coronavirus deaths by a large margin.

Do you know how many people died of the flu in China? Officially?
Source 1
Source 2
2019 - over 144 in January
2018 - 144
2017 - 41
2016 - 56
This peer-reviewed paper using official influenza data between 2004-2015 indicated that out of 1173640 recorded influenza cases, 107 resulted in death.

So by official Chinese data, Coronavirus has killed 3300 people, more than the flu did in the past 15 years

How they are counting this? I was not checking this but it is suspiciously low, compared to for example USA data.

[ChairmanPoo]

Flu deaths this winter still exceed coronavirus deaths by a large margin.

Do you know how many people died of the flu in China? Officially?
Source 1
Source 2
2019 - over 144 in January
2018 - 144
2017 - 41
2016 - 56
This peer-reviewed paper using official influenza data between 2004-2015 indicated that out of 1173640 recorded influenza cases, 107 resulted in death.

So by official Chinese data, Coronavirus has killed 3300 people, more than the flu did in the past 15 years

...well I find those numbers hard to believe given that with a fraction of the population, the US is estimated to have 25-50k deaths per year.

I do not take the covid19 numbers at face value either mind you, because every country seems to be using different testing criteria, and different dead counting criteria. But if left unchecked this shit has to surpass seasonal flu. I mean no seasonal flu is able to hit most of  the population. Even if the fatality rate is overestimated that'd result in tens of thousands  of deaths by sheer numbers

[Reelya]

That seems like deliberate obfuscation on the part of the reporters.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909231/

Pneumonia is one of the leading causes of death in adults and children in China. In urban areas, pneumonia is the fourth leading cause of death, and in rural areas pneumonia is the leading cause of death. A recent article in the Chinese literature estimated that each year in China there are 2.5 million patients with pneumonia and that 125,000 (5%) of these patients die of pneumonia-related illness

125,000 per year according to Chinese sources die of pneumonia, which is on the right scale compared to USA flu deaths: about 4 times the average flu deaths for the USA.

They're not hiding the deaths they're just labeling them differently. It ... didn't take very long to find the right information, seeing as how the pneumonia is what kills you so I merely googled "China pneumonia deaths" to get the right figures.

So anyone spinning it that the Chinese are "hiding" flu deaths is either an idiot or a liar. They're merely "hiding" it by writing pneumonia on the death certificate, which suggests that's just standard practice in Chinese hospitals. It wasn't exactly rocket science to work this out.

[andrea]

On the topic of chinese hiding coronavirus deaths:

Numbers could be underreported even without malice. In the most affected areas in Italy there are a lot of people dying out of the hospitals, which means that the cause of death can't be pinned down on the virus. In some places, people are reporting that the number of deaths above he expected number for this period is 4-10 times the number of reported coronavirus deaths. Right now I just heard it on the news, but maybe I should look for the actual published studies (or rather news articles, I really doubt they had time to peer review). And that number of course includes people who didn't have the virus, but other illnesses or afflictions which couldn't be cured because of collapsed hospitals.
Point is, it could be that China is being honest with numbers, and yet that there are more deaths than reported simply because they got overwhelmed like everyone else.

[mko]

So anyone spinning it that the Chinese are "hiding" flu deaths is either an idiot or a liar. They're merely "hiding" it by writing pneumonia on the death certificate, which suggests that's just standard practice in Chinese hospitals. It wasn't exactly rocket science to work this out.

They are not lying, but intentionally or not they are obscuring data.

Especially as pneumonia is not an illness, it is a condition with more than one illness causing it.

Similarly declaring "serious illness" as death cause would not be lying but it would be obscuring data.

"hiding flu deaths" is more, because it requires deliberate malicious action. It may or may not be present, but it seems possible. Manipulating data is popular everywhere, and there is no real good reason to lump all pneumonia deaths together. But maybe it is just some old tradition/standard.

[Reelya]

There's a colossal difference between lumping bronchial pneumonia and influenzal pneumonia deaths together, which is just poor record keeping in terms of getting accurate data, and the claim that there's a government conspiracy to hide deaths. Saying it's sort of the same thing is misleading.

And anyway, we don't even know whether the reports are really accurate that they don't know how many people died from flu. Perhaps they list pneumonia as the primary cause of death, unlike the USA which lists influenza, but they list "tested positive for influenza" in the medical records as well, just not listed as the primary cause of death.

All we know is that for most pneumonia deaths that's listed as the primary cause of death, and that this is apparently different to what's listed on American ones. If it's just a difference in how their record system works, then the original complaint would be comparing apples and oranges.

[ChairmanPoo]

Point is, it could be that China is being honest with numbers, and yet that there are more deaths than reported simply because they got overwhelmed like everyone else.

I think it's half and half. At this point I dont trust any goverment not to be duplicitous woth this stuff, but I also think the unreliability of numbers can come for reasons not linked to this (number of tests limited by test availability, overwhelmed healthcare systems, etc...)

[mko]

Independent from reason, it casts doubts on their Covid death number.

Maybe they are counting only people who died in hospitals? Maybe most of them are hidden in pneumonia statistics like with flu?

There's a colossal difference between lumping bronchial pneumonia and influenzal pneumonia deaths together, which is just poor record keeping in terms of getting accurate data, and the claim that there's a government conspiracy to hide deaths. Saying it's sort of the same thing is extremely misleading and biased.

In general it is hard to distinguish "collecting useful statistics is hard", "collecting data failed because people lied to us", "people with good intentions made mistake", "data optimized for different use case", "adjusting data to reduce systematic errors during data collection", "biased statistics, collected to support something", "manipulating data", "fabricating data", "not adjusting data to reduce systematic errors during data collection" and "badly adjusting data to reduce systematic errors during data collection".

And Lizardman’s Constant Is 4% ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ )

I agree that this such mistake is not sufficient to support conclusion that China government is deliberately misrepresenting data.

And anyway, it is more likely that director of some Flu Death Prevention task force would be responsible for that than someone top level of government. It is unlike Xinjiang re-education camps case ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps ) where lying was/is a deliberate action from top levels of government.

So anyone spinning it that the Chinese are "hiding" flu deaths is either an idiot or a liar.

But with more evidence that it is deliberate? Then such person would not be idiot/liar.

They're not hiding the deaths they're just labeling them differently.

That is exactly hiding them. Intentional or not, it is effective in misleading at least some - see http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=175464.msg8115488#msg8115488

[TamerVirus]

They're not hiding the deaths they're just labeling them differently.

Then how many Coronavirus deaths were labeled pneumonia deaths and thus not part the official count?

[ChairmanPoo]

They're not hiding the deaths they're just labeling them differently.

Then how many Coronavirus deaths were labeled pneumonia deaths and thus not part the official count?

Probably many. Its happening everywhere. We are missing hundreds of deaths. And probably hundreds of thousands of diagnosis.

Chances are we will never know