I was born in Wuhan and half of my family are currently holed up there. A few days before the Wuhan lockdown was ordered, coronavirus already made it to the headline in CNN and NYT, but there was not any headline news about the coronavirus within China. Heck my dad wasn't even wearing a mask on his 1hr metro commute to work until the day before lockdown happened.
In early January, government officials and news outlets were reporting: "There are false rumors about Wuhan having a SARS like virus. This is an unknown virus that's _probably not_ transmittable from human to human. There are only 45 confirmed cases. There is no need to panic. "
One of the officials even organized a thousand people CNY dinner as part of the CNY celebration a few days before the lockdown.
They had a thousand opportunities to curb the disease and alert the people, but the Chinese bureaucracy and leadership's imcompetence directly caused the coronavirus disaster.
Edit: January 21 news article on the thousand people dinner from a Chinese source. About 40k people participated, this neighbourhood is about 10 minutes away from the epicenter: https://news.163.com/20/0121/15/F3E3UTKI0001899N.html
http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-01/28/c_1125508460.ht...
Google Translated: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2020_01_01_530191.shtml?s=zw...
>Piecing together the events in Wuhan shows that for at least three weeks before the banquet, city authorities had been informed about the virus spreading in their midst but issued orders to suppress the news. (https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06... linked above)
As for the govt lying about the bushfires, yes most definitely, we had tourism chiefs out there on the offensive claiming Australia was fine to visit when most of the East Coast had the worse air quality on Earth for months.
We had a tourism minister standing on a half burnt Kangaroo Island which was still in lockdown from the fire telling people it's the best time to visit.
Govts lie all the time for self interest. And strangely many of the public totally support them doing so when it's their team or for personal benefit.
WHO says they can, but only if used very right, and only alongside other measures: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/advice-on-the-use-of...
Coronavirus has disrupted many businesses in China, and I think the government knew this would happen if more people found out about it. So their priority was not getting a big economic hit, not solving the issue.
This is a good post on what happened, but there are others like it if you want to dig deeper on how they tried to cover it up:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-dis...
I'll just copy these 2 paragraphs here to address your "China responded quickly" comment:
> To be sure, at first glance, China’s government has appeared to be more forthcoming about the latest outbreak. But, although the first case was reported on December 8, the Wuhan municipal health commission didn’t issue an official notice until several weeks later. And, since then, Wuhan officials have downplayed the seriousness of the disease and deliberately sought to suppress news coverage.
That notice maintained that there was no evidence that the new illness could be transmitted among humans, and claimed that no health-care workers had been infected. The commission repeated these claims on January 5, though 59 cases had been confirmed by then. Even after the first death was reported on January 11, the commission continued to insist that there was no evidence that it could be transmitted among humans or that health-care workers had been affected.
In this thread people are still sharing articles about how there akshually 10s thousands of dead and how the virus was intentionally released from a government lab. And at the same time surprised that the government arrested people spreading panic on social media.
It took them a month to recognize atypical viral pneumonia and report it to WHO. Another ~10 days to isolate the virus (no mean feat, read the paper) and sequence it. Here in the Netherlands people would be just sent home on paracetamol - I had a pneumonia couple years back so I speak from experience.