That was very early days in the pcr testing protocol : I also argued strongly to loosen criteria but alone at that time : just took them very short time actually to come around after massive clamoring from front line : so yes your correct a bit slow : there were concern about the high false neg I believe. But you know look at the country by country progressgraphs : look where we could have been now : and we are not :
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/soci...onavirus-china
Something published in Science, no less, apparently supports those results. Could an alternative interpretation of the Diamond Princess and S Korea clusters be that even those very mild cases were counted? I suppose definitions matter, and an overloaded system (in terms of fatalities) has no time for those.