My wild-***ed guess is that the real number of CV19 fatalities in China is @ 10 million, +/-5 million, and the year is young.
This is the end of Chinese Communist dreams of grandeur. They'll be lucky to be in power ten years from now.
“It took 50-60 YEARS, and scores of waves of epidemics, for the pre-Conquest population of Mexico to drop from 20 million to 2 million. It did not all happen in the period 1521-24.”
The Native Americans in 1521-1524, nor the Europeans, had planes, trains and automobiles and a global economy. They had vast distances, slow travel and a hodgepodge of groups that often avoided each other entirely (was gonna say “like the plague”, but...) so that 50-60 years was still pretty fast to depopulate 2 continents.
First Spanish colony was in Florida in 1565, IIRC. Serious colonization didn’t really get going for a while.