People keep conflating 'lab leak' with 'made in a lab'.

Think about this: If it was a natural virus that escaped from a lab, China wouldn't necessarily even know about the escape for sure. We could imagine a scenario where maybe China started to suspect that might be what happened around Jan/Feb 2020. So then you don't need a collosal cover up, because hardly anyone knows for sure anyway - you just need to obstruct anyone asking questions that lead in that direction, and obfuscate any clues (publications from the lab saying what they were working on, reports of staff illness etc)