We shouldn't.
The other side of that coin is, why should we take the declaration that "the numbers coming out are lies" as fact? Where's the evidence?
HERE'S a good summary of the evidence for "not trusting" an Authoritarian regime that has moved to silence ALL speech and reporting except it's own.. "Not trusting" is a nice way of saying they are lying thru their OWN media and not allowing a speck of speech on the topic...
Critics Say China Has Suppressed And Censored Information In Coronavirus Outbreak
They charge that news of a new pneumonialike illlness was kept from the public for weeks — and that social media accounts are being shut down if certain types of comments are made.www.npr.org
China's state censors have clamped down this week on digital items related to the outbreak of a new coronavirus, removing local news reports that expose the dire circumstances in the city of Wuhan, epicenter of the outbreak, and scrubbing social media platforms of posts from Wuhan residents who say they are ill and desperate for medical care and supplies.
Those restrictions were put to the test on Friday after the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, one of the eight whistleblowers reprimanded by police for warning others about a mysterious pneumonialike disease in December. Less than 90 minutes after his death on Friday morning, the hashtag "I want freedom of speech" was trending on Weibo, a popular Chinese blogging site, with nearly 2 million posts. The posts were gone by sunrise.
This chokehold on information, now six weeks after the first public reports of a pneumonialike illness surfaced on Dec. 30, heralds a new stage in the Chinese state's response to the new coronavirus.
"We are also seeing these restrictions being accompanied by intensified propaganda," says Maria Repnikova, a global communications professor at Georgia State University. "The message being: We get that this is a grave problem, and we are fixing it."
First, for nearly four weeks, the municipal government officials in Wuhan worked to hide the severity of the disease. Then, when scientific disclosures made it untenable to downplay the crisis, regional authorities began placing quarantines unprecedented in scale and intensity over large swaths of the country.
Now, China is working to reestablish control over the narrative by shutting down individual social media accounts and reigning in aggressive local coverage of initial government missteps that may have contributed to the spread of the coronavirus beyond the city of Wuhan.
Within the quarantine zone, people have been confined to their apartments or new mass quarantine wards. But online, information began to proliferate.
Muckraking Chinese journalists have been publishing interviews with doctors with damning details that sometimes contradict official accounts. One piece, since deleted by censors, alleges the official tally of infected patients is far lower than the true scale of the outbreak, citing several Wuhan doctors.
To counteract the critical coverage of the Wuhan quarantine, the Communist Party's publicity department dispatched over 300 reporters from state media agencies to Wuhan and Hubei province earlier this week.
Government cyberspace regulators mandated in a notice on Wednesday that the country's biggest Internet companies, including Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance, "conduct special supervision" on epidemic-related news. Soon after, social media platforms, including WeChat, began suspending accounts found to have spread "sensitive information or illegal content," according to screenshots of sealed accounts. Tencent did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
"I think what this act is telling us is that the discussions online are entering into the zone of perceived sensitivity for the state," says Repnikova of Georgia State University.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ANYONE who actually believes these are the ACTIONS of a trustworthy source, deserves to LIVE in an authoritarian regime like this.. That's why most of us have enough self-preservation to KNOW when a govt is not to trusted... Like when they INTERFERE with any of of MAJOR self-claimed liberties and freedoms..
It's not rocket science Jack...
Good CHRIST you're fucking dense.
You pulled the same shit last week too. It's a pattern. Apparently so busy running your mouth that you can't read. It would appear you're desperately trying to bog me down in the game of "I'm too stupid to figure it out" until my original point just magically disappears.
Will not work. I don't forget.