The simple though somewhat superficial explanation is that the Chinese government is allergic to criticism and that anything that's less than "China is a paradise on Earth" is perceived as "criticism".
No matter what the origins are (lab leak, wet markets, or something else) it's going to be due to something Chinese people did. "Blameless post-mortem" doesn't seem to be a concept the Chinese government is familiar with, and in general doesn't really seem to be an aspect of Chinese culture.
Plus there really is plenty of blame to go around; they absolutely botched the initial response to COVID for seemingly no other reason than to "save face". Doctors who raised the alarm early on were rewarded with reprimands. This is already widely known, but they have no interest to bring more attention to it. It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response.
> It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response.
Based on the earliest found wastewater samples in Italy, along with what we know about how the virus spreads, this is very unlikely. By the time China was reprimanding doctors the virus was already spreading in Europe.
To the best of my knowledge these studies are rather controversial: they may be false positives, and there isn't enough corroborating evidence. It's certainly a possibility – I don't expect we'll ever establish the exact timeline of the spread for sure.
The wastewater study in Italy is pretty good and fits the pandemic timeline and doesn't claim anything particularly outrageous. They had lots of samples turn positive, the ones that turned positive generally stayed positive. It was just a bit more than 2 months before the first recognized deaths, which fits the timeline of a few weeks of cryptic spread, 4 weeks of doubling every 3 days to get to >1k infected, followed by 3 weeks for the disease to progress to death.
Now take the traveling of people working in (fast) fashion, and where those clusters are into account.
The first Italian wastewater study took samples between February and April.
While the timeline of the 'dramatic actions' article suggests intervention and meddling with data by politicians by at least early December.
The first documented COVID hospitalization was 16 Dec 2019. The first sample was sent for sequencing on 24 or 25 Dec 2019. 27 Dec 2019 was the date of the first medical report.
It was between those days an 20 Jan 2020 when Zhong Nanshan went public with the information that it was communicable human-to-human that the government in Wuhan was dithering. Long after the virus was already in those samples in Italy.
To be fair, blameless postmortem is at most dubiously part of anyone's culture, except at the smallest scale. It's not something that comes naturally to humans, and I only know of a few cases where it's stable at any large scale. The US NTSB comes to mind, but I bet they have to fight everyone else's urge to play the blame game on every investigation.
That's true to some degree, but in general there is far more willingness to find the truth. And in some cases blame also should be assigned; "never assume blame" is just as foolish as "always assign blame". There's often a bit of tension there.
No matter what the origins are (lab leak, wet markets, or something else) it's going to be due to something Chinese people did. "Blameless post-mortem" doesn't seem to be a concept the Chinese government is familiar with, and in general doesn't really seem to be an aspect of Chinese culture.
Plus there really is plenty of blame to go around; they absolutely botched the initial response to COVID for seemingly no other reason than to "save face". Doctors who raised the alarm early on were rewarded with reprimands. This is already widely known, but they have no interest to bring more attention to it. It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response.