If you take a swab of someone and it comes back as a virus that causes the common cold what response do you expect?
A person gets a cold virus ... what should happen next?
It wasn't until it was sequenced that they found it was a new variant.
Someone else wants to check it (basically luck or maybe policy since SARs) and when they do they notice it is different - 7th of January then by the 14th, they have it sampled and they have detection kits.
Because of SARs Wuhan takes a few days to figure out what to do and then decide to quarantine the entire city. It is a rush job but they don't exactly have a lot of time.
From the real discovery (7th) to massive response time is 2 weeks. In the past it has often been over a month before anything effective is done. What would you do differently?