[afiori]

> If there was no possible way to avert it, how did China avert the vast majority of equivalent deaths?

By being ready to lock people in their homes and preventing them to even go buy groceries.

Are you proposing that western countries should/could do this?

We could also ban all sugar/sweeteners, alcohol, driving and sitting still for more than 6 hours a day; this would also save a lot of lives.

You can tune a Paperclip Optimizer to any single good metric, it does not mean that it is a good idea.