"the consolidation of Nazi rule had lifted the spirit of the German people, even as the world watched warily, and explained that one tactic above all was helping Hitler and Goebbels with that uplift: “explaining away all Germany’s defeats and trials in terms of the Jew.”

The blaming of a country's problems on an "other" is the exact tactic that Goebbels used. Calling it the "Chinese flu" isn't as explicit as Goebbels, but it's still implicitly blaming and offloading a lot of negative baggage onto a group of people that isn't to blame.