quite a few vendors use cooking oil that has been pulled from waste from sewer lines and other extraordinarily unsanitary locations

This seems hard to believe at first, it sounds rather xenophobic. OTOH, I remember reading in the past that people in some countries have been poisoned by cooking food in used transformer oil.

By the way, the official death toll in Wuhan is 2,571 as of April 7. But separate calculations of the number of urns purchased by funeral homes and the cremation capacity and use of the cremation ovens put the death toll somewhere between 42,000 and 46,800.

I’ve read that phone usage records point to an even higher death toll.