https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/estimating-the-true-number-of-chinas-covid-19-cases/

Report

Estimating the true number of China’s COVID-19 cases

American Enterprise Institute

FOREIGN AND DEFENSE POLICYASIA

April 7, 2020

 

Key Points

• China’s COVID-19 figures are not arithmetically sensible. The Communist Party has deliberately made estimation difficult, but, outside of Wuhan city and Hubei province, cases are low by a factor of 100 or more.
• In late January, Chinese media provided information about migrant outflow from Wuhan before quarantine. Using a lower number than theirs, then conservative figures for migrants’ infection rate and time in circulation before national lockdown, generates an estimate of 2.9 million cases. 
• This is partly due to China’s huge population. That population can also hide COVID-19 among tens of millions of respiratory illnesses. Along with harshly enforced censorship, the population can hide tens of thousands of deaths.

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Introduction

In early April, headlines read that the global figure for COVID-19 cases had breached one million. At the same time, China rejected charges by US intelligence and others that it has lied about the extent of its outbreak.¹ Population size makes it almost certain that China’s disinformation about what happened outside the original outbreak city of Wuhan is worse than the disinformation about what happened inside. A conservative estimation process, starting with numbers provided by the Communist Party, indicates that the world passed one million cases weeks ago, most of those in China.

Straight from the Party

China and its defenders will reject any and all evidence, but their task can be made a bit harder. Begin with an article on January 27 from a party-vetted state media outlet. The numbers from the article, even making the most important one much smaller, shows China lying on a huge scale about COVID-19 outside Hubei province. The article reports:²

• Five million people left Wuhan in the three weeks before the lockdown;
• 30–40 percent, or 1.5–2 million people, left Hubei entirely; and
• About 465,000 people flew to the 10 listed cities outside Hubei.

The third item conforms to a 520,000-person monthly average in air travel from Hubei and is a direct count.³ Keep it.

The first figure is too round; five million is too easy for a politician to say when the truth is multiple millions. Doubting Wuhan’s mayor in this instance keeps China’s numbers lower, but, when you question those numbers for a living, you cannot pick what you like. The article says 2.4 million people left Wuhan for a 2018 holiday, but there is no matching figure for 2019. Cut the 2020 level to three million. It might be more like four million, but five is too high.

Related, the share given as leaving Hubei may be accurate, just not for a total of five million. A top destination when leaving Hubei is Henan, which has both the largest population of the neighboring provinces and a city that sends the most migrants to Wuhan. The number of migrants from this city is 1.54 percent of Wuhan’s population, about 170,000 people.

The flights graphic in the article has other popular cities for outbound travel. If fewer than half a million people flew to those and the most likely top city received no more than 170,000, it is unlikely 1.5 million left the province, much less two million. Use 1.2 million—still 40 percent, but of the lower estimated outflow of three million. (Same result from using the low end of 30 percent and an outflow of four million.)

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Notes