I don't think we should be making theories about block sizes =)
my guess is that they were probably at 220-40 at start of 2024 and then eclipsed 300 sometimes in second half of last year and probably at low 300s at start of this year (based on yankee's statement that apparently people died in CAC from work exhaustion, ~100 last year seemed not unreasonable). And probably hit 400 sometime this year.
I would say it’s very tenuous to link death in service directly to workload.
I have been on sites where workers have died while on duty and they were far from overworked or over stressed.
Usually it’s just underlying heath issues kicking in and have almost no direct causal link with work or the activity they were performing when tragedy struck.
I’m not saying death from overwork isn’t real, but that generally takes many years of accumulated overwork to do someone in.
If workers at CAC are regularly clocking excessive hours in order to meet production quotas, that is obviously not sustainable, and likely did contribute to abnormally high death in service numbers. But odds are the majority of the deaths would have occurred anyways in that timeframe even without any overtime.
Correlation does not equate to causation. If there are abnormally high death in service rates amongst CAC workers, it’s important to properly investigate the true cause rather than jump to conclusions. As I personally would not put it above certain adversary powers to covertly target the civilian workforce as a means of causing disruption to Chinese core national defence production for example.