They're a mix of conditioned (brain washed) and terrified at being disspeared by the CCP.
Make no mistake this is a CCP caused pandemic, and is aptly called the CCP-Virus in Hong Kong: I fear anything short of having the CCP on trial for Crimes Against Humanity in the The International Court of Justice will only exacerbate the problem and will lead to further pandemics, as they never learned from SARS.
They censored the Physician calling out to the World how grave this disease was, and he subsequently died. Citizen Journalists have since gone missing that exposed the decrypted state the hospitals were in and the amount of dead were piling up and left aside.
The CCP and by extension the WHO are responsible for censoring medical professionals and citizen journalists from speaking about COVID19, the WHO served as a mouth piece for the CCP and down played the efforts of containing the contagion of both Kong Kong and Taiwan alike--the former in defiance of the CCP and Lam regime. All while spreading misinformation about Human to Human transmission, downplaying the significance of masks in helping limit the spread etc...
The Chinese populace aren't stupid, and China doesn't have the level of totalitarian control that North Korea has. Flat out denying it happened is a great way to weaken how much trust the population have in the state media.
Highlighting the (supposed) superiority of the Chinese approach to solving it to the rest of the world, now there's a gold mine, and you can be very subtle about that.