Certainly China would not be the only place misreporting results. For example note the strange Japanese effect where confirmed cases suddenly started increasing after the olympics were cancelled (another reason could be that everyone who tested positive had to go to hospital and so there were incentives not to test people to save hospital space).

Alternatively they could be accurately reporting results but just systematically not testing infected people for one reason or another.

It’s not clear to me that they are totally wrong though they seem quite unbelievable. I think I don’t want to think about that question as I’m not sure the answer would be much use to me.

One thing that is certain is that we can expect to see a lot of different people trying to set/change the narrative of how this outbreak happened. Any state that instituted a large lockdown will want people to believe that it was worth it and that it was necessary. One might ask why there isn’t much talk of Taiwan and Hong Kong where the outbreak was controlled without oppressive lockdowns (before cases from external arrivals became a big problem). One reason could be Chinese politics about those places.

In the US it seems plausible that being able to rewrite the history of the outbreak in the first few months of the year will be very important to Trump’s re-election. It also seems plausible that it won’t matter that much; his approval ratings are basically their highest ever.

I think some leaders will also want to move the blame away from themselves. A lab-escape story would be very useful to those people as it gives some people to directly blame (whoever let it out of the lab), rather than blaming the failures of leadership during a natural disaster.