[palmer]

China's massive population has about 20M deaths per day (7MM per year)

China has 7.3 deaths per 1000 or 10.5 million per year. Like most temperate countries, winter deaths are at least 10% higher than summer, probably more for China. That gives us about 30k deaths per day in winter months. Your numbers are off, but that doesn't matter since your contention is that they would not quarantine a major industrial city over a few hundred deaths.

I forget the exact numbers, but back then a major Chinese site posted numbers that were way different from the official ones for a very short time, and seemed much more like the real numbers based on China's locking down cities and other reactions to the virus

Speculation based on "leaked" data with no provenance is pointless. They quarantined 60 million people with more than the normal 1300 deaths per winter day because there was an unknown virus filling up hospitals. The fringe news stories talked about 100's of cremations per day in Wuhan. That's normal.

[Svartalfiar]

Your numbers are off, but that doesn't matter since your contention is that they would not quarantine a major industrial city over a few hundred deaths.

Eh, Chinese stats on anything are hard to find a trustworthy source, as most of it is based on fake Chinese numbers anyway. And I'll admit my death number is probably somewhat old. But yes, a few hundred deaths is nothing over there.


Speculation based on "leaked" data with no provenance is pointless. They quarantined 60 million people with more than the normal 1300 deaths per winter day because there was an unknown virus filling up hospitals. The fringe news stories talked about 100's of cremations per day in Wuhan. That's normal.

Then you tell me a better method for calculating the real numbers that China is hiding, and probably doesn't even know. There was no official spike of deaths at that point - 4-500 deaths spread over a month or two when the quarantines started. Sure, a bunch of sick people filling up the hospitals isn't good, but it's not something China, of all places, would shut down a major industrial city, cancel Lunar New Year (one of the biggest holidays in China), and shut down the capitol city, for.

The 'fringe' news stories I've seen say thousands of cremations a day, not just a hundred. They also show lots of other situations (docs dying, alkohol sprays of the entire city, people welded inside and left to die, several extra hospitals built in a couple days, etc) all of which do not correlate to something that's only killed a couple thousand people. As other people like to say, the flu kills over 100M people in China every year, so why would a bare couple hundred deaths cause such a panic?