It can explain Wuhan's early ignorance, but it cannot explain the incompetence of the government after the case has been escalated since the end of December.
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?