35% of china are farmers and wouldn't be affected. 17.8% are children. This leaves less than half of China or about 800 million. China's non-farm workforce is about 450 million. Now we have 30 million cell subscriptions gone. We live in a day & age when even homeless people have cell phones. Cell phones are literally the last thing people stop service on. Hard to imagine people canceling service because money is getting a little tight. It's reasonable to believe though that China has been canceling peoples service that have been talking about things china doesn't want them talking about.
China Mobile is only one of the top 3 mobile servie providers. you need to cross check their competitors' data to confirm the total mobile figures for the last two months. If you check the historical figures, the monthly new subscribers grew quite steady at about a few million monthly. This is a typical life cycle of mobile subscriptions with the efforts of hundreds of thousands aggressive salepersons at local retail sites. When most cities lockdown for a month or two, the sales and retail services halted, and thus attracted fewer subscribers. Same thing will happen in USA in the next month or so.
10s of millions is quite large but apparently people are lining up to collect the ashes of loved ones. The lines are quite long for a few thousand deaths...
Predictions at the moment, 0.02% mortality rate, slightly under normal flu at 0.024%, which puts them at about 300K, last news leak on the decline already was 200K dead so more realistic, think 10Mil too high from the recent data. Massive panic over nothing!!