If we are a nation of 325 million and China is a nation of 1.43 billion, how many Chinese die of the flu each year?
Do the math - and still the Chinese enact horribly extreme measures that the word ‘draconian’ does not begin to cover. The scale begins to emerge ...
Just scaling up our flu losses, they would lose about 100K/year. Adjust that for them having more crowded cities, sanitation and cleanliness habits that are not up to Western standards, and a healthcare system that is not as good (certainly not for 99% of them), and I would **speculate** that they have at least 250K death/year. I would also assume that they don’t think that it is a big deal in a country with 1.4 billion people - those on top may even view it with favor, getting rid of primarily older, non-productive people.
And even in the face of this, they are quarantining whole regions - which definitely speaks to their leaders’ knowledge that this is a catastrophe in the making, with the possibility of millions of dead and the shut-down of a LOT of their industry.