"What do you suppose would have been the consequence of screaming "epidemic" in a city of 20 million?"

Dr. Li was not some lunatic waving a 'The End is Near!' placard on a street corner. Casting aspersions and insinuating anyone telling factual truth is some kind of whacko is simply pejorative and ignores the real world where actual results follow from actual events.

Allowing open and reasoned discussion enables science - it's all that does. It's why China uses the NCBI, why Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Institute of Military Medicine, Nanjing Command, submitted sequences to that database. The truth is that what's good for science is good for people.

The truth enables people to take logical actions. That's why it enables scientific progress, and why people would have supported immediate quarantine and treatment of the initial outbreak had they known about it - instead of not knowing and continuing to conduct their affairs in ways that resulted in the present epidemic and horrible economic disruption that may well kill more people than the virus itself.

The censorship and oppression of brutal Chinese overlords caused this epidemic as much as the virus. What you advocate for is the problem that is destroying Chinese society, civilization, and the people themselves. I utterly refute it, as I do all destructive and murderous oppression.

"What use would be the information regarding infectivity or mortality of this plague serve the average man? He neither possesses the capacity to enact public policy, nor the authority to decide the fate of 1.5 billion people."

The individual acting in their sovereign capacity is the necessary level of action to resolve epidemic. It is individuals that change their behaviours, such as wearing masks in public, not spitting in your eye, and other necessary actions to prevent the spread of infections, including quarantines.

All overlords can do is either brutally harm people with welding their doors shut, or drive them to escape for their very lives, neither of which promotes successful quarantine and survival of people you claim overlords benefit.

The censorship and oppressive brutality of Xi and the CCP caused this epidemic, destroyed the Chinese economy, and have existentially threatened the Chinese people themselves, when honesty, respect and compassion due sovereign people, and telling the truth would have ended this outbreak before it became an epidemic.

Live with the results of what you advocate. The Chinese people, those who survive, do.