Coordinating medical information is notoriously hard, particularly when the government doesn't want to acknowledge something. Let's take Florida as an example.
There was a point at the beginning of the covid pandemic where the governor was declaring that the state only hand a few cases, and there was not great need for concern. The pneumonia death rates for the previous months showed a different story. For the previous two months the death rates were 10x higher that normal. Nobody seemed to have noticed that at the state level.
Most outbreaks follow a pattern where the disease shows up in small pockets for many years before it becomes an epidemic. HIV is an example. The first HIV death in the USA happened in 1969. The oldest confirmed case in Africa is in '59. The oldest suspected death in the US is '52.
Crossover tends to happen multiple times, and there is no reason to expect otherwise with covid-19. The problem with finding these cases is that it happened in an area governed by an authoritarian ruler. Authoritarians don't want to admit that there are things out of their control, and by inclination they conceal bad news, or news that makes them look like they're less than omnipotent. They shift blame rather than dealing with problem.
The love of the lab theory in the US seems to be driven by the same desire to push the blame on someone else. It takes the focus away from the incompetent response.
The pandemic was discovered by ordinary doctors in Wuhan who noticed the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients. Only then were specialists engaged to identify the cause, and the viral genome was first published by Zhang Yong-Zhen in Shanghai. The WIV isn't known to have played any role in this.
Perhaps the WIV secretly discovered the new virus by more sophisticated means before those doctors did. There's no evidence for this, but maybe. There is no possibility that a Wuhan-level outbreak occurred in a different city first, though. China keeps tight control of their mass media, but mortality on that level is impossible to conceal. Do you not remember 2020? The coffin shortages? So your implication that the WIV's presence somehow caused the first cases in a natural pandemic to get ascertained in Wuhan just doesn't make sense.
This topic is unfortunately politicized, and you're not helping. I think it would be helpful to spend more timing studying the scientific evidence, and less time speculating over the motivations of one's perceived ideological opponents.
