This is about as reliable as the reports claiming that 20 million Chinese people had died because of a dip in the number of cell phone contracts early on in the

This is about as reliable as the reports claiming that 20 million Chinese people had died because of a dip in the number of cell phone contracts early on in the pandemic. The idea that the virus was spreading to any significant extent in Wuhan in May 2019 is absurd. The outbreak only reached sufficient proportion to be noticed in late December 2019, when hospitals first started noticing clusters of pneumonia patients. And by all appearances, the Chinese government was completely unprepared for the outbreak - the response in late December 2019 through mid-January 2020 was chaotic and ineffective. The idea that the government had been secretly preparing for more than half a year in advance of the first known outbreak in Wuhan just doesn't make any sense at all. It's a sad statement on the state of journalism that this sort of nonsense gets any traction in mainstream media, and it's an even sadder statement on the level of anti-Chinese paranoia that people buy it.