[lamontcg]

China didn't know they had a virus at all in November 2019. The 16th of December is the first documented hospitalization in Wuhan. A wastewater sample in Italy collected on 18th of December was later found to be positive. 23rd/24th of Dec was the first sample collection in Wuhan which was sent to be analyzed for a novel pathogen. 27th-30th of December is when the alarm bells started really going off in China. The first official messages and international alerts went out on Dec 30th and on Dec 31st Reuters published it's first report.

So the virus had been in Italy at least 2 days after the first hospitalization in Wuhan, and around 5 days before doctors collected the first samples which were sent off to labs which later determined it was a novel virus.

You actually can't blame China for not acting before they really had any patients or knew anything was going on.

[dannyw]

Chinese government records put the first case as Nov 17, with a daily trickle of cases after that:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

[lamontcg]

That's useless since he didn't cause any suspicion in medical authorities, he was just a 55 year old patient, presumably with pneumonia. He was of no public health significance until the retrospective analysis was done in January.