You always take things from CCP with a grain of salt, currently it seems like they already f*ked up and cannot cover up this outbreak anymore

I think the more accurate phrase was that it wasn't human transmissible .. as far as anyone knew / there wasn't evidence to show it was.

I think with any new virus or etc folks focus on what they know at that time ... and effectively waiting for testing / what they observe to enhance their understanding.

No. It was shown that human to human transmission happened in December.

The issue is that the Chinese gov't threatened prison to anyone who reported it.