You might be write that their statistics are accurate, but I feel this misses why they might not be. In China data is always reported with an eye to how the government will react. Nothing "carefully fabricated". Each hospital is motivated by itself to reduce numbers.

As far as I know, every business or agency has CCP party members involved. They get final say on the data. We have the same issue here, of course, just not quite as strong.

Also, seems to me, after March 10th, NYC Covid cases should have fallen off a cliff after two weeks. Did they? I'm finding "Expired" by Clare Craig very interesting. She argues it's possible only 15% were vulnerable to each variant and that why we see a few waves every year as each variant sickens a certain number of the population. I'm probably messing that up, but makes sense to me.

My question is, assuming your assessment is correct, did China benefit from later, less deadly (if they were) variants? That seems to have happened, though they're paying the economic costs.