FR had a good ongoing thread about Covid 2019.
I posted on it quite a bit.
I think it started in December 2019.
It did seem to some of us this might be bad.
A pandemic was the one thing that had the potential to stop Trump’s re-election so that’s what we got.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3853868/posts?page=1
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3810827/posts?page=66
lots of links
A local media outlet near Wuhan reported it on 12-27-2019 in China, although the ChiCom government knew perhaps 2 months before that, if not even longer before.