The epidemic is even worse in 1641,…

The epidemic is even worse in 1641, with one hundred and three locales across China reporting epidemics, many of them big, the greatest of them concentrated southeast of Beijing, in Hebei and Shanxi.

It is likely that twenty to forty percent of the population dies in many of these places.

What in Wuxian is likely an epidemic of dysentery kills perhaps seventy percent of its victims, with bodies by the thousands collected daily.