I have a hard time seeing a different outcome if a virus of similar potency came out of Africa or somewhere else, based solely on how poorly leaders from around the world have responded to it.
Authoritarian structures generally excel when you need a lot of people to do a lot of the same thing: responding to disasters in simple but effective ways, high volume manufacturing, grunt and infantry level military operations, and large infrastructure projects.
These are the areas where China leads the world. With the possible exception of the military, America and other Western democracies are downright horrible at these things. We can't build infrastructure, have lost much of our high volume manufacturing, and react to disasters with delay and bickering and population non-compliance.
Where they don't excel is creativity, invention, innovation, culture creation, and maximizing individual well being in peacetime. They're also more politically brittle because there is no graceful mechanism for non-violent political change.
For a while they suppressed information about what was going on in the region, suppressed information to the outside world about the virus, and generally said "Everything is fine" delaying their response.
Now, to their credit, once they committed they did an excellent job. And the population has complied in amazing fashion. But the slow-moving party has a weakness that it won't broadcast when things are starting to go wrong until they can't ignore it any longer.
You can also imagine what would have happened if they continued to lock up critics for even longer.
Enlightened authoritarians only work if they are, well, enlightened. Once corruption seeps in those same levers of power can be exploited for personal and Party gain.
In the same vein that there are democratic countries who are handling COVID 19 much, much, better than the West. Not to mention those same countries give us great "innovation (e.g. technology), culture creation (e.g. Parasite), etc.". The Western democracies should not escape blame because they are "democracies".
Also on high volume manufacturing, China's success at this has nothing whatever to do with authoritarianism. None of the big manufacturing concerns in China are state run, they're all private companies build using private capital. Their success is a result of the government getting out of their way.