I disagree. They took many months to report SARS to WHO, yes. But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31. Then it took them about another week to sequence the genome and share it with the world. Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand. The difference is huge.
Take a look at this timeline by the American Medical Association: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130
We've now been able to trace the earliest case back to November, but nobody knew about it until late December, so that doesn't count as cover-up.
It wasn't good enough, that's true. And before human-to-human transmission was confirmed, they should have been a bit faster, though I would argue they couldn't have been much more faster than about a week or two.
Mistakes definitely have been made, and it still isn't good enough, but "they haven't learned and they won't learn" is quite simply not true, and is more based on prejudice than fact.