From [1]: The “seasonal” reflects the fact that viruses can’t tolerate high heat and humidity, preferring the cool and dry conditions of winter and spring, Webby said. That’s why flu, as well as the four coronaviruses, are less prevalent in warm, humid months.
1: https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...
Also less prevalent in warm and humid regions (though spread in Singapore and Thailand is ... interesting).
This is among the reasons my concerns' been on a breakout in North Korea, which has both a meterological and political/epidemiological climate that seems highly favourable to outbreak of a disease such as 2019-nCoV.
Though it's politically viable to order a near-complete shutdown of transportation and travel, the likelihood of this being effective (particularly against high-level party members breaking quarantine), or pragmatically possible to sustain (what exists of the PRK economy likely requires people in close contact), limiting epidemiological effectiveness.
However I would like to inquire why you see Dr.Li's detention as evidence of "shutting down initial reports of the outbreak"?
First of all we do not have any kind of real insight on what Dr.Li was actually saying, and what was the severity of his reprimandation.
When something is on the lose that has the potential to kill millions, you need to be quick and purposeful in controlling the message. Wrong information can make people underprepare, but it can also make people overprepare.
The letter of admonition he received has been posted, see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#/media/File%3A李文...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
I don't speak or read Chinese but can rely on multiple news reports (e.g., BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795, SCMP: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3049561/dr-l...) and Wikipedia's inclusion and characterisation as strongly reliable indicators.
The BBC is the UK's national broadcaster. SCMP is owned by the Alibaba group, a major mainland China corporation. Each clearly labels Dr. Li as a whistleblower. SCMP's story includes a highlighted summary "China’s health authorities and the public have offered their condolences over the death of the doctor, whom police tried to silence in the early days of the outbreak".
Both articles focus on Li's acts in breaking the nCoV story -- without really wanting or intending to -- the initial negative response of Wuhan police, and the narrative now, from authorities such as Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (reported in the SCMP story) that "that the eight people punished by the police should be held in 'high regard'", again, quoting the SCMP directly.
As for ongoing suppression of discussion adjacent to the nCoV outbreak, messages of support for Li and criticism of the Chinese government continue to be censored:
The top two trending hashtags on the website were "Wuhan government owes Dr Li Wenliang and apology" and "We want freedom of speech".
Both hashtags were quickly censored. When the BBC searched Weibo on Friday morning, hundreds of thousands of comments had already been wiped.
(From the BBC story.)
As a new disease, with the first cases possibly being acquired as early as late November 2019, it wasn't until mid to late January 2020 that city and national authorities appeared to start taking the outbreak seriously.
I'm not aware of other novel outbreaks outside of China and how quickly those have attracted notice, though there's the case of the 1976 initial outbreak of Legionaire's Disease, reported within a week of first outbreak (though the disease was both fast-acting and rapidly lethal for many victims). However epidemiologists also realised that there had been previous, unrecognised outbreaks, dating to the 1950s. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires...
The case of HIV/AIDS in the US and elsehwere would be a case of a disease with ascribed social and moral assocations, for which early responses were very much delayed, on of several examples of stigma associated with the disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_...
Reponse to the 2012 MERS outbreak appears to have been swift -- in November of 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Middle_East_respiratory_s...
The 2003 SARS epidemic, also emerging in China, also first emerged in November, but was not internationally reported until the following March:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
(The fact that SARS, MERS, and 2019-nCoV all appear to have emerged during November may be significant.)
Point being:
- China are slow to detect, report, and respond to new contagious epidemics. Notably so in the case of SARS, and less so, but still, with 2019-nCoV.
- Other countries, including the US, have had similar failures.
- Early unofficial public disclosure of 2019-nCoV was prosecuted by Chinese authorities, though at what direction is unclear.
- Trust between the people and the government is somewhat frayed.
- There are also numerous actors with incentives to make the most of any missteps of the government, or to inflate distrust.
Several of those groups have legitimate gripes against the Chinese government, and I've seen reports associated with Falun Gong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan specifically. I've not seen any associated with Tibet or Uygher populations. And there are various rabble-rousing actors elsewhere, doomers, and conspiracists (generally of the nutcake variety).
This ... clouds information. Many of the criticisms are legimate, some are not, and sorting fact from fiction (both between and within reports) is challenging. China are in the position where both locked-down and unfettered communications are potentially harmful -- the first for preventing accurate information from being available to both public and government, the latter for allowing agents provacateurs to rumourmonger, exaggerate bad news, and spread active disinforation. This is strong shades of attacks the West has seen over the past several years (within the US, UK, EU, and elsewhere), some of it from China itself.
How China responds will be interesting.