China Forced To Revise Number Of Virus Cases Sharply Higher After Hubei Caught Undercounting New Infections, by Tyler Durden

Zero Hedge has been bearish on the coronavirus (meaning things are going to get much worse). I post both the bear and bull (meaning the whole thing is way overblown) cases because the experts are all over the lot, and I don’t trust anybody’s statistics. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

China’s desperate attempts to manipulate coronavirus “data” lower to ease public fears about a runaway pandemic and get more people back to work, are crossing into the outright laughable, if not surreal.

As a reminder, earlier this week, China’s Hubei province where the quarantined epicenter of the covid-19 epidemic, Wuhan, is located, once again changed the definition of a coronavirus “infection” in pursuit of a lower number of new cases by defining a case as “confirmed” if it stems from a positive result in a nucleic acid test, not if it was clinically diagnosed by physicians, a reversal of the definition change it adopted just  a week earlier which resulted in the biggest daily increase yet, when nearly 15,000 new cases were reported. Sure enough, this led to a plunge in new cases, with Hubei reporting just 411 new cases on Thursday and 349 new cases on Friday, sharply lower from the 1,000+ cases reported on previous days.

There is just one problem: at the same time as Hubei was priding itself in its sharp drop off in “confirmed” cases (carefully ‘doctored’ definition of new cases notwithstanding), a new breakout was been observed in the local Hubei prison system. And, problematically, for the brand new leadership of the Hubei Health Commission, it appeared that none of these cases were actually accounted for in the official province-level data.

Oops.