China didn't even admit human to human transmission until mid January.
They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019 since there are suspect cases in Europe already at the beginning of December, of people that had never been in Wuhan.
If this is true, then it's not a given that COVID-19 even originated in China.
This new study of scanners identified two cases of suspected coronavirus, on November 16 and 17
[0]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/corona...
China’s first confirmed Covid-19 case traced back to November 17
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...
The outbreak of pneumonia was recorded in the Orenburg region
(Turn on captions, then select Captions -> Automatic translation -> English)
Because it was even newer and more unknown at that point. Wuhan was in lockdown on the 23rd of January, so they had a pretty good idea by then. Meanwhile the rest of the world twiddled their thumbs and lost the opportunity to contain it.
> They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019
How do you "admit" something unknown? Either way we know it couldn't have been too much before November/December, considering everything we know about how fast it spreads.
Actually, this is not so clear. The evidence of community cases in November/December in e.g. France were not picked up at the time either. There is a phase were a new disease can fly completely under the radar, because we are still in a very slow growth and only see a few isolated cases, which often don't even get seen by the same health professionals. This is particularly true in the case of covid were there is evidence that spreading is disproportionately from "superspreaders" (unless some of that information changed now?). So unless there was a superspreader, you only have few isolated cases.
Everyone seems to also forget that a lot of this took place when they wrongly thought surface transmission was the main vector. The bigger problem was the delay in recognizing aerosol transmission, Chinese scientists cottoned on to this very early but the CDC and WHO dragged their feet.
We also saw everything play out and get politicized in real time in a way that's never happened before. There are lags between data and science, further lags between science and science communication and then even more from science communication to government policy. On one end of this lag you've got scientist warning of aerosol transmission, on the other side you've got Fauci still operating under the surface transmission advice leading to some very mixed messaging. Reducing this lag will be important in future.