How long is 'long before'. The emergency was notified 20 days after the very first confirmation this was even human communicable, and 7 days after the first published data on morbidity. These are the facts, and the WHO was communicating all of this promptly.

Yes of course the WHO was just a mouthpiece for what the Chinese were saying in the very early days, because the Chinese were the only people with the data. I understand this is frustrating, it's infuriating in fact.

It's only an international emergency when it's international. It was a declaration of fact, not a prediction about the future. The same is true of calling a pandemic, they declared it when it reached the criteria to do so. That's their job, but there seems to be a popular misconception that they should declare a pandemic when there 'might' be a pandemic, but that's not the case.

I have seen this in my professional life. I've come under pressure to declare escalated emergencies because there 'might be' a high level impact, but the agreed SLAs were to declare those only when there is actual impact. There were specific agreed processes for potential high impact issues and we followed them and they worked, but still I've had pressure to break process and escalate inappropriately, sometimes by very senior management. Fortunately my current management are pretty well informed.