Sometime in the next week a momentous event will take place: Australia will overtake China in total Covid case numbers.

Let me be very explicitly clear: these are the absolute total number of cases recorded in the two countries since the start of the pandemic back in January 2020.

Not cases adjusted for population, but the actual totals of all the cases recorded in the two countries over the 20 

So, it’s Australia, population 26m – and, even with the events of the last two months in NSW and Victoria, still one of the great global success stories (so far) in limiting case numbers and deaths - a total of 87,134 cases.

And China, population 1446m – or 55 times Australia’s - a total of just 95,738 cases.

The figures come from Worldometer as of Monday morning.

China is reporting around 30-50 cases a day, Australia around 1500 a day.

Do the math, or just trust me: by next Monday, our total will have gone past China’s.

That’s cases, not deaths. China still leads us on Covid-reported deaths – 4636 to 1167. But, adjusted for population, our death rate is 15 times China’s.

As I’ve reported before and, well, ‘ironic’, in the light of our increasingly fractured but still highly dependent economic relationship, the last Covid death China reported supposedly took place almost eight months ago, on – wait for it – Australia Day, January 26.

Was it sending us an extraordinarily subtle communist Confucian message?

I draw one big conclusion from these numbers: it should drive home to even the meanest intelligence that you cannot trust a single figure – on anything – that comes out of China.

China’s Covid numbers are literally and utterly undeniably unbelievable.

A medical worker displaying a syringe with the Sinovac Biotech vaccine against the COVID-19 coronavirus at a healthcare centre in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province. (Photo by STR / AFP) / China OUT

A medical worker displaying a syringe with the Sinovac Biotech vaccine against the COVID-19 coronavirus at a healthcare centre in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province. (Photo by STR / AFP) / China OUT

Not unless you believe that Chairman Xi, Chairman Mao Version 2.0, has found the magic touch that somehow eluded our Chairman Dan, who up until recently believed that he knew - and indeed that he alone in the world, perhaps in combination with his chief health officer, knew - how to defeat the Delta variant.

So-called experts obsess over the fine print of Chinese economic and business statistics. Will the next growth figure show growth was 6.8 per cent or 6.7 per cent? And the deep significance of the difference in terms of, say, how much iron ore China will buy from us.

As Humpty Dumpty said: a word “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.

Something similar applies to Chinese figures; all their figures. They mean exactly what China wants them to mean; and that “meaning” has zero correlation with the truth.

What’s more, more importantly, is that it’s utterly impossible for ‘outsiders’ to know or to analyse what the ‘truth’ is, and also why any figure is what it is. And therefore what is really happening inside China and how that impacts on us (and the rest of the world).

Right now the price paid by China – and everyone else – for our iron ore is plunging. Earlier this year it peaked well over $US200 a tonne. Friday it was just over $US100. Monday just below.

If it stays where it is, it would slash $80bn off our exports and off our economy – and more than $20bn off (mostly) Federal and WA tax revenues.

One of China’s biggest property developers, Evergrande, has collapsed – in reality if not yet formally.

Guess where most of our iron ore ends up? In concrete in China, including in all those ‘empty’ cities.

That’s on one side of the Pacific; on the other, in Washington, the Fed will tell us what it intends to do with its ‘taper’.

Wall St is building into a pre-emptive ‘taper tantrum’ to make the Fed back off. Our market went down 2 percent Monday. It’s building to an ‘interesting’ week.