COVID-19 # 52 (Required Parts Highlighted)

The next problem for Americans is going to be rolling closures of "essential services". This week it's a Smithfield Farms production facility in South Dakota, that produces about 5% of the packaged pork products in the country. I seen this as potentially a big problem, but not one so far — what is essential is that places like this don't start to shut down simultaneously. BTW: the "pig farm" in Milford (about 45 minutes north and then northwest of Cedar City) is part of the supply chain for Smithfield Farms.

In China, there were provinces, especially to the north of Wuhan, where the first wave of COVID-19 had little impact. Suifenhe, in Heilongjiang, is not under a lockdown similar to that in Wuhan from 11 weeks ago. This includes building new hospitals. China is blaming this outbreak on travelers from Russia. There may be some truth in that, but it only takes a few seconds on the internet to confirm that most of the population in that area lives on the Chinese side of the border (and epidemics tend to go urban to rural).

The Epoch Times has obtained health department documents from Wuhan during the worst parts of the outbreak. I have stressed two big points about Chinese data this semester. The first is that it tends toward falsehood; not outright lies, but consistent shifts in one direction. Students in past semester seem to get a good handle on that, but they're less good on the second point. This is, that China's data problems start at lower levels of government, are compounded as they go up, and are not typically a national policy coming from Beijing. These new numbers fit that pattern. 

• On January 12th, during the 2 week period when authorities in Wuhan were claiming that cases has plateaued at 41, data showed that 200 people went to the hospital for a fever in just of one of Wuhan's thirteen districts (of course, fever is not something one usually goes to the hospital for). 
• It is not known exactly how many hospitals there are in Wuhan, but 200 is a rough guess. On January 29th, 26 of them were designated for COVID-19 patients only. However, at the same time, hospitals were told they could not report COVID-19 cases unless they were one of those designated hospitals. The city reported 356 admissions to those hospitals that day, while one of the 13 districts reported 150 hospitalizations for COVID-19 outside of those hospitals. This is suggestive of an outbreak 5 times the reported size. That's consistent with the crematoria data which showed an outbreak 12-13 times the reported size. Also, growth rates of 64% were in the official data as recently as 2 days before this move; growth rates dropped steadily after that.
• On February 11th, the columns on the data reporting forms for COVID-19 used by local hospitals were deleted, and did not appear again. That date corresponds to a discrete drop in official daily growth rates of cases by over 20%, followed by continued smooth declines.
• A listing of names of confirmed COVID-19 deaths from March 14th shows that 71% were outside the 26 designated COVID-19 hospitals, and an additional 26% did not have a hospital designated. Only 3% of the reported COVID-19 deaths were from a COVID-19 designated hospital.
• Lastly, a report from a residential compound for hospital employees in Hubei indicated that a third of them were infected.

Again, I'll emphasize that The Epoch Times is not friendly to the government in Beijing, so they are definitely looking for dirt. Having said that, they usually find it, and it tends to be quietly confirmed in our legacy media within a few days.