China does actually have a history of epidemics stating there, mostly due to high population and bad health. China already has probably thousand if not more with it and 1 or 2 cities quarantined. I'm aware China tries to protect their image even if it fails horribly. You're right, we are great at controlling outbreaks but not when it is an unknown disease. I mean shit, how long did it take for people to treat the plague properly? This disease is apparently spread by human contact which means it's even more shit for high density population areas, mainly including Asia and even more so China and India specifically.

China is the worst fucking possible place for an outbreak to start and here we are, again. No matter how good medicine is we are never prepared for things we don't know no matter how prepared we think we are.