You're right, and this could very well be a propaganda piece, but it somehow comes off as genuine. There are activists in China who recognize the severity, understand the grasp of the party, and still desperately attempt to reach out - including the selfless doctor who died yesterday, and a number of activists who have already been disappeared. No doubt the number of such people has been increasing exponentially and the only antidote to authoritarian control is numbers. It's plausible that enough Chinese sympathetic to dissemination of such critical information have gathered such that an article like this may be genuine.
Moreover, while many terrible rumors ostensibly from educated and/or directly witnessing sources from the dregs of the web have turned out to be true, these sources are even less reliable than the CCP, given the propensity of netizens for exaggerating and/or deliberately spreading falsehoods. Which is to say reports out of China may not be that much less reliable than much of what is floating around and at this point, as ridiculous as I know it sounds, I'm almost willing to relax my suspicion and cling to slivers of hope.
The undesputed facts so far are grim. 80-90% of the Chinese GDP has been shut down, we still don't know with certainty just how contagious or dangerous the virus actually is, but it is obviously more virulent than any of the previous viruses from the Corona family, and if for whatever reason containment fails for an extended period of time in a region, you can expect severe social hardship. How long can China continue to operate at 10% capacity?
It is only prudent in my opinion to make at least minimal preparations now with 1-2 months of food and water before panic potentially sets in and stores are emptied. There is still a high probability that the virus will be sufficiently contained and minimally deadly, but this also is shaping up to possibly be the biggest threat faced by civilization in centuries, exceeding the Spanish Flu of the early 1900s. I'm about halfway through Gallaher's report linked in these comments (very thankful for it) and I hope I'm wrong, but even his numbers are understandably prefaced with uncertainty.