https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-economic-data-have-always-raised-questions-its-coronavirus-numbers-do-too-51581622840

Anomalies had shown up in China’s coronavirus numbers even before the change in methodology. For instance, the number of deaths reported appeared to correspond to a simple mathematical formula to a very high accuracy, according to a quantitative-finance specialist who ran a regression of the data for Barron’s. A near-perfect 99.99% of variance is explained by the equation, this person said, referring to a statistical measure known as r-squared. That’s a fancy way of saying that the data updating the number of deaths was almost perfectly predictable. “This never happens with real data, which is always noisy,” the person said.

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“I have never in my years seen an r-squared of 0.99,” Goodman said. “As a statistician it makes me question the data.”

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Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, said he expects the outbreak to shave 1.5 percentage points off Chinese gross domestic product this year. He recently revised his 2020 GDP estimate for China to 4.6% from 6.1%, and he said he thinks the virus will take a 0.5 percentage point off global growth this year.