It’s crazy people now think who downplayed the epidemic. I had the opposite feeling until the situation got really bad in italy too : that they cried wolf for something that looked a lot like a flu..
It didn't look a lot like flu. China doesn't shut down their entire country for months over the flu.
There was always this possibility that china communist party was overreacting for fear of alienating its population, after having denied the virus itself for months.
The flu theory was never reasonable. Clinical case studies were available from the beginning of the pandemic and long before the first media personality came up with the flu thing.