[salawat]

Note: Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early on. The International Airport, however, was left open.

There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:

Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.

Beijing didn't grant it because

A) Poor information propagation Or B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result. Or C) some combo of the two.

I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.

[slumos]

C) Trapping foreign citizens in their country would have caused an international incident when very little was yet known.

[salawat]

Every country understands the concept of Quarantine. There would not have been even a blink of an eye within diplomatic channels. At least I don't think so. It also doesn't jibe with the tight lipped behavior of the Chinese Government, and the iron fist they dropped on their academic establishment that under no circumstances were virological materials to be widely published without Party approval.

The clamp down on information exchange does not strike me as the actions of a group with everyone else's best interests in mind. And given that we have hitherto been pretty chill with China on the whole, I really think if they had gone "screw it, international travel lockdown"; you'd have seen materials and humanitarian relief being flown in in order to help out with citizens stranded overseas. We may not even be having this conversation, because to be frank, how China did decide to react just doesn't make any sense except in the context of someone with something to hide.