Wang Naiyu, director of the REN Centre for Urban Resilience at Zhejiang University, noted significant differences in emergency warning and rescue models between China and the United States.

In his own province of Zhejiang, on China’s eastern coast, the government deploys large numbers of frontline workers to go door-to-door before a typhoon strikes to ensure that everyone is evacuated as required.

In contrast, the US does not enforce mandatory evacuations, according to Wang. Instead, the authorities issue warnings and leave the decision to evacuate up to the residents themselves.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters, who writes for the website Yale Climate Connections, said that in China “mandatory” really meant mandatory, so there were fewer people in harm’s way when a storm hit.

“The death toll from hurricanes in the US tends to be higher because a ‘mandatory’ evacuation order is not really mandatory – up to 40 per cent of the population will ignore it,” he said.