Our coronavirus outbreaks started mainly in Europe, but also in Washington State and maybe New York

I'm sure that you must worship at the shrine of Haaahaaavid Medical School

Well it seems that by taking advantage of commercial satellite imagery to look at 5 or so major hospitals in Wuhan and also monitoring the number of searches for specific COVID-19 related symptoms on Baidu, the Chinese version of Google -- the authors came to the conclusion that" there was early disease activity in the Fall of 2019". In other words -- perhaps the Chinese Communists were working even harder on a Cover-up than we had already suspected.

According to the Haaaaavid Medical School on-line published study*1 -- COVID-19 was already spreading in August 2019.

...we consider that SARS-CoV-2 may have already been circulating in the community prior to the identification of the Huanan Market cluster..... We collected 111 satellite images of Wuhan (multiple sites per image) from January 9, 2018 to April 30, 2020 resulting in 140 successful daily extractions of parking lot volume from hospitals....and 117 from the three high-volume control sites....Between 2018 and 2020, there was a general upward trend of increased hospital occupancy ... [with a] steep increase in volume starting in August 2019 ... and culminating with a peak in December 2019.....between September and October 2019, 5 of the 6 hospitals show their highest relative daily volume.... coinciding with elevated levels of Baidu search queries for the terms “diarrhea” and “cough”.... Both search query terms show a large increase approximately 3 weeks preceding the large spike of confirmed COVID-19 cases in early 2020 .... There is a large decrease in hospital volume and search query data following the public health lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2020.....

Had Beijing let the world know what was happening in Wuhan, even say in October -- the pandemic might have been limited to an epidemic in Wuhan and perhaps most of the rest of Hubei Province with perhaps a few controllable outbreaks outside of China.

It was at this point in time [early Autumn], however, where Beijing [Political] as opposed to Beijing [Scientific where our CDC had created a Chinese Clone of itself and the NIH] perceived the spreading COVID-19 as a possible economic weapon of mass economic destruction.

Beijing carefully limited intra-China travel to/from Hubei while simultaneously allowing people to travel between Hubei and overseas places with a lot of Chinese / foreign travel such as northern Italy and the West Coast and Northeast of the US. In particular, hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were infected essentially commuted to/from Wuhan over the Chinese New Year.

China sacrificed one Province and a few million people who suffered in their lock-up, while the Money and Political Class in Shanghai and Beijing were well insulated. At the same time, -- with a phase lag of a couple of months -- the disease conquered first Europe, and then the US -- setting our economies back a couple of years in the course of a month -- and the disease is now spreading rapidly in South America.

*1
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/426697...

Analysis of hospital traffic and search engine data in Wuhan China indicates early disease activity in the Fall of 2019 (2020).
Nsoesie, Elaine Okanyene, Benjamin Rader, Yiyao L. Barnoon,
Lauren Goodwin, and John S. Brownstein.

Abstract:
The global COVID-19 pandemic was originally linked to a zoonotic spillover event in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market in November or December of 2019. However, recent evidence suggests that the virus may have already been circulating at the time of the outbreak. Here we use previously validated data streams - satellite imagery of hospital parking lots and Baidu search queries of disease related terms - to investigate this possibility. We observe an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume beginning in late Summer and early Fall 2019. While queries of the respiratory symptom “cough” show seasonal fluctuations coinciding with yearly influenza seasons, “diarrhea” is a more COVID-19 specific symptom and only shows an association with the current epidemic. The increase of both signals precedes the documented start of the COVID-19 pandemic in December, highlighting the value of novel digital sources for surveillance of emerging pathogens.