Coronavirus

The US was choosing to only report cases of people who were displaying severe symptoms of COVID-19 up until as little as four weeks ago, simply because of your country's unnecessarily restrictive guidelines on testing and reluctance to accept test kits made by laboratories other than the CDC. Plus, Trump downplaying the severity of the pandemic wouldn't have helped matters; there would be people in the hundreds, if not thousands, who were displaying the symptoms of COVID-19 and chose not to go to the clinics to get tested. The figure is likely much higher than the c. 330,000 reported by the government. 

What i'm saying is, I don't think you can look at any of the reported cases around the world at face value. There's always going to be a degree of invalidity and uncertainty over the exact number of confirmed cases, you don't know what data the governments and health departments are retrieving their information from and two, you're basically trusting everyone with the virus to go and get tested for their symptoms (which will simply never be the case). 

Not sure what your point is? Nobody is really 100% completely honest. I’m just saying China is most definitely suppressing their cases and it’s obvious. Anyone who thinks the numbers are even close to what they say is being naive. They tried to suppress the cases of the coronavirus at the beginning. What makes you think they aren’t doing it again?

I don't even think it's comparable to what Trump has done. He seems to be taking it more seriously than he did back in February, but there's no way there are only 81,740 cases of coronavirus in a country with a billion people, and especially in the country where the coronavirus first appeared. That's a huge sign they're suppressing it again. I wouldn't fall for it.

The epicentre of the virus was in Hubei province with a population of around 60 million, not one billion. You might not have an accurate figure of the cases but you cannot disregard the approach taken to stamp out the spread of the virus. Once the provinces around China were put in real lockdown - not a half-hearted attempt - then the spread of the virus throughout the country was dramatically slowed.

How are all of your countries handling the pandemic at the moment?

Here in Australia, our government is considering (though it hasn't been confirmed at this stage) putting a "herd immunity" plan into place and gradually reduce the restrictions over the next month or two. The daily infection rates have dropped, however the idea of easing restrictions when the community transmission numbers are still rising is ridiculous. People here have become too complacent. As morbid as this sounds, I actually hope an outbreak does occur in Australia, because only then will our government and the general public get the idea that this is a serious matter of concern. Our schools are still open. This whole time, Australia hasn't actually been in a full lockdown like most other countries around the world. We're doing things half-arsed, just like we always have done. I predict that the moment our states start to ease off on restrictions and social distancing, the number of cases will grow exponentially. It's a ticking time bomb. 

You can only have "true" numbers by constantly testing everybody. Most countries, with the exception of South Korea and Germany, aren't testing enough people. Many (mildly) infected people are obviously isolating themselves at home and recovering without ever becoming part of the stats.