There's no defending any communist regime, but I think the more likely explanation is that China had no reason to suspect that it was anything other than flu fo

There's no defending any communist regime, but I think the more likely explanation is that China had no reason to suspect that it was anything other than flu for a long time. They made it worse by trying to "manage" the panic by deleting social media posts, etc. And even otherwise, they put their economy ahead of the health of their citizens (like countries are doing even today, like the US). As far as we know it was identified as a novel pathogen on the 26th December. Its actually hard to know where to collect the sample from, and if you don't know what you're looking for, its extremely easy to miss. You can't just put a virus under a microscope. Its not unreasonable to assume that they didn't have any confirmation for a couple of weeks that the virus they sequenced was the exact same virus for all of the other cases. You need to develop a fool-proof protocol for a diagnostic test that has minimal false-negatives. No easy task to do in 2 weeks, etc, etc...