[“Men and Asians are 5x more likely to get it.”
Source?]
I think that’s extremely unlikely. What’s more likely is that Chinese death rates are probably the tip of the iceberg and low compared to what non-Chinese death rates will be, as we’re now seeing from death rates in Italy and Iran. At the same time, I think the Chinese response is overwrought. It hasn’t done that much damage in China, relative to the flu (don’t know if the Chinese even keep flu death statistics).
Here’s a clue as to the impact of viruses originating in China on China itself vs outside of China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Hypotheses_about_the_source
[One of the few regions of the world seemingly less affected by the 1918 flu pandemic was China, where there may have been a comparatively mild flu season in 1918 (although this is disputed, see #Less-affected areas). There were relatively few deaths from the flu in China compared to other regions of the world.[24][25] This has led to speculation that the 1918 flu pandemic originated from China.[26][27][28][29] The relatively mild flu season and lower rates of flu mortality in China in 1918 may be explained due to the fact that the Chinese population had already possessed acquired immunity to the flu virus.[30] Thus in 1918, China was spared from the worst ravages of the pandemic, due to the apparent greater resistance to the virus among the Chinese population compared to other regions of the world[31][32] ]
There’s no magic here. People whose ancestors have been eating exotic animals and getting infected by pathogens thereof for thousands of years are going to have superior immunity. The genetic lineages that were vulnerable got very sick and died out. They left far fewer or no descendants.