I'm not convinced it's effective considering people across the globe are still being infected. This is just Chinese government dealing with problems in the only way they know how: through inhumane brute force, flailing until the rest of the world solves it for them.
Even if it did spread outside, it gave days and weeks for the rest of the world to prepare to deal with it
Until a western/free government handles an equally bad crisis (on week/month zero), one has to believe what Chinese did is as good as it gets
If China did not hide their numbers, the rest of the world would have taken it seriously earlier?
Cases outside China are, indeed, growing at an exponential rate.
Cases inside China are growing at a sublinear rate.
As far as I can tell, it's the rest of the world (sans a couple countries like Singapore and Taiwan) that are flailing.
Cases in China are growing at a sublinear rate according to the Chinese government.
China is loosening up quarantine regulations, bit by bit.
If their numbers are faked, then they're also being faked to internal decision makers.
And, for what it's worth, the WHO confirms the numbers are broadly accurate.
Careful there. You’re about to be called a shill, and downvoted, or labeled an apologist, for writing anything positive or supportive, about China’s handling of the crisis. It appears HN has become just the same as the braindead Reddit crowd, since most people visit both sites.
China managed to contain it as a pandemic purely to Hubei province. There was almost certainly more internal migration between provinces than there was international migration so we have a sample size of n = 33 successful containment protocols in the face of an unknown number of asymptomatic carriers.
If every country in the world had adopted containment procedures as severe as Chinese provinces, this virus almost certainly wouldn't have been able to gain a foothold and we could have avoided the risk of a global pandemic.
As much as China might be faking numbers, you can't hide a pandemic, the signs are simply too obvious.