Back when the first patients were showing up at Wuhan hospitals, late November as best we know (sort of), it was not recognized for what we now know it was. Nor were there enough similar patients being treated by one or two or ? doctors to recognize the presence of a pattern, until mid December, probably. All in all, there were probably some in and about Wuhan and Hubei Province who "got" the virus, but never had symptoms severe enough to go to a hospital. Wuhan being a major industrial center, some of those people who recovered without going to a hospital were foreigners, including Americans.
China's failure - from Wuhan to the national government - to be forthcoming made for a lot of uncertainty and, of course, resulted in the disease spreading worldwide when it could have been contained.
And then the more-were-infected-than-had-to-go-to-the-hospital scenario has been happening all over the world (Mrs. S in CA knows someone who probably caught the virus in Oz, and rode it out at home).
