> It was a reason, I'll give you that. The biggest reason was China not being clear with information sharing. The WHO supporting that, because "now is not the time to point fingers", and countries either underestimating, or forced to overestimate (like the UK was forced to treat this very severely).

I just don't buy the "China not being clear with information sharing" part that much. I mean, a week after the preliminary report China locked-down a city of 11 mil, how much serious would China have to get?
China also release guidelines on diagnoses and treatment, and update quite rapidly on their guidelines (as expected for a novel virus).
China did not stop Chinese researchers from release papers on findings about COVID-19, from research on the virus itself to various treatment results on patients and even better practices for patients.

In other words, China is responsible for China, just like US is responsible for US, and UK is responsible for UK. Each country's CDC need to do their own research, evaluate their country's resources, and make their own guidelines, and educate their populace.

> No we already knew by then that coronavirus could survive on plastics for days. That active SARS was known to survive in sewage system for weeks, and demanded extra chlorination.

> But there was more time to allow for a cover-up and produce an alternative story.

I'm not sure about your timeline, but a rough search shows that concerns about getting COVID-19 from packages etc. have not been a priority:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/04/go-ahead-op...
https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/03/can-coronavirus-be-sp...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/coronavirus-is-it-safe-to-bu...
https://time.com/5899803/coronavirus-frozen-food-china/
These are from multiple sources at multiple time periods, very rough, but a slice of media perception that risk of transmission from packages etc. are low.

> No. It was extremely useful, and still is, to treat this virus as SARS-1. SARS-2 is unlikely to be constructively different, no matter if epistemic science takes years to validate a hypothesis.

> Ask yourself why an initial policy was 180 different from a policy that would be sane for a precursor disease?

You do realize that most of the carrier and spreader for SARS-COV-2 are pre-symptomatic (some asymptomatic), and it spreads before symptoms (if there will be symptoms)? That's vastly different from SARS-COV-1, which exhibited much lower rate of asymptomatic spread (I don't think there were research of pre-symptomatic transmission, such was not observed), only around 3-8%. But pre-symptomatic transmission for SARS-COV-2 account for multiple times that, and depending on different research papers 8-20x (3x20 -- 8x8 -- 10x8).
This makes detection and quarantine day and night vs SARS-COV-1, which spreads after symptoms. So temperature scanning etc. which were effective for SARS-COV-1 turns out to not be even closely effective for SARS-COV-2, and need PCR testing and lab works to ascertain.

> The point is that curbing travel from a country that is suffering an outbreak is effective against fighting that outbreak. Not 100%, but nobody is claiming that. There is water on the floor, you close the tap before you start mopping.

> Banning travel from China helped, it would have helped a lot more if done earlier, and doing it the next time is going to help combat spread.

> Asymptomatic spread is only a reason for travel bans (which target everyone from the epicenter, not just visibly ill people, who are "strongly advised" to not travel). Not a reason for throwing your hands in the air and going: Now it won't help at all!

I don't know. Banning a single country while allowing rerouting to other countries is more hassle, but I doubt how many will be dissuaded by that. I mean, if UK banned India and Russia did not, and rich Indian Business men have assets in UK, what's stopping them from buy tickets that stop at Russia? So basically do more than just banning a single country, you need to trace tickets and origins and whatnots to be effective enough.