Only China has the bandwidth and ability to go after asymptomatic cases right now, everyone else couldn’t even find all their symptomatic cases, which is why no other major economy has been able to get a handle on this once an outbreak is in full swing.
I expect global (bar China) reported confirmed cases to only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of actual number of infected. Even the British agree, which is why their ONS does its own survey to estimate likely true number of infected based on scientific sample methods while the official government headline figures are just test confirmed ones, which are massively lower.
On top of that you have countries like the US that is where government officials are trying to suppress the number of tests to bring down confirmed case numbers.
The key reason China has succeeded where all others have failed in dealing with this outbreak is because China has not fucked about playing political spin games or trying to cover up the outbreak, and instead used the the data to drive their efforts and went to unparalleled lengths to expand and refine their testing and data collection capabilities.
I think this is a perfect case study in how the different educational and professional backgrounds of Chinese leaders compared to western ones make a decisive difference in their problem solving capabilities.
Chinese leaders overwhelmingly have a STEM educational and professional background, which instils in them a respect and trust in statics and scientific methods.
Western political leaders OTOH, overwhelmingly have a media, legal or arty background where often facts don’t matter. Instead it is what you can make people believe that is key to success in those fields.
While Chinese leaders accepted the facts and went straight to using data to finding and dealing with the key issues, western leaders never got past the denial stage, and have been focused almost exclusively on how to try to spin the story in a positive light rather than actually trying to deal with the underlying root causes.
This is obviously not limited to Covid, but covers pretty much every aspect on governance, which is why China has been gaining so rapidly and relentlessly on the west in recent decades. All Covid did was strip away all the media spin and political lies, whereas western media and leaders have been able to hide and/or explain away most everyday evidence of how China is comprehensively outperforming the west.
This is above all else why western media and political elite see China as an existential threat to their way of life, because it is. Only they are spinning that to try to convince the idiot masses that China’s system of governance is a threat to all their ways of life, when objectively speaking, the overwhelmingly majority of western society (other than the political and media elite) would benefit enormously if western nations adopted a Chinese style scientific and personal responsibility driven style of leadership and governance.
That’s why you hardly see any coverage of how China has managed to beat Covid in the west until recently, when the threat of a second wave is making the west desperate enough to life their censorship and news ban.
