It keeps being posted that way to keep people from panicking but people need to at least think about what it would take if you had to get your family through a quarantine. The have barred the doors to apartments and apartment complexes so people cannot leave. The problem is that in China you go buy your food for that day and do not have long term food on hand. They have locked them up to starve in many cases.
“They have locked them up to starve in many cases.”
Well, that is one way to make a disease burn itself out fairly quickly, and with the use of minimal resources. It isn’t what any decent person would do...but we are dealing with the ideological descendants of a man who had 60 million of his citizens murdered for ideological reasons. This is about literal survival - even “dear leaders” can get sick, and so can their families - so they are unlikely to exercise even their customary level of brutality in dealing with problems. Expect more stories like that. Hell, they could (and perhaps are) doing it to entire apartment complexes or maybe entire cities - how much food is coming into Wuhan now that it has been quarantined?