That's impossible. China is not North Korea. All it takes is just 1 asymptomatic infected person to leave the country - perhaps 1 hour before the hypothetical country-wide lockdown - for the virus to spread.

No, it's even worse than that. Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019, before anyone in China knew that this existed.

Besides, western countries didn't take the virus seriously in the beginning at all. Even a month after the Wuhan lockdown, the Dutch didn't take much action, while Trump said it's just the cold. The attitude was basically: it's only a disaster in China, outside China it's not serious.

> The attitude was basically: it's only a disaster in China, outside China it's not serious.

Your comment is on point. I'm certain that many European countries benefitted from the escalation in Italy and pictures of army trucks filled with body bags. From then on, most took the virus a lot more serious.

'It's only a disaster in X, in our country it's not serious' has been a recurring theme and it's one of the things that makes me bearish going forward.

>Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019

I've always been skeptical of this; test enough samples and you will get positives. More careful and systematic analysis is required on this one.

It has been already analyzed in very fine detail, what you mention is an obvious double/triple check. If you have a sample that changes whole global narrative, you can make enough detailed tests on it to have statistical chance of error close to 0. Too bad they don't have earlier samples, we could possibly find it way earlier.

It wasn't October 2019, actually Italy had September 2019! A few countries had it back-identified before official Wuhan ones. France had December. Its very well possible that Covid originated elsewhere, but that's another topic.