Comment by adventured
20 hours ago
There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.
It is not in Beijng's interest to know. The truth that is convenient for the Chinese government is that it had nothing to do with Chinese government research. Therefore that is the truth and nobody is going to go digging much deeper, or if they do it's going to be buried in some report that never gets published.
The local government could still fear retaliation for failure to regulate public health.