Because we know what a disaster it was at the end?

We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.

Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?

Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.

If there were widespread covid on the scale of every other country, China is not so closed off that they could keep that a secret.