Covid-19 may have Started in California

There is still a lot of attention to the origin of covid-19, but one thing puzzles me. Everyone says it started in Wuhan China, and spread to California in late Jan. 2020. The Wikipedia article on Timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in California says:

The following is a timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in California.
2020
January–February
On January 26, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first case in California, the third case in the U.S. The person, a man in his 50s, who had returned from travel to Wuhan, China, was released from the hospital in Orange County on February 1 in good condition to in-home isolation.

And yet the Red Cross published proof that it was in California in 2019:

A study by the American Red Cross and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), entitled “Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2 reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020,” was recently published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal. This study aimed to determine when the virus might have first appeared in the United States by using archived samples from routine blood donations collected by the Red Cross. The non-identifiable blood samples used in the study—from donors in nine states between Dec. 13, 2019 and Jan. 17, 2020—demonstrate one way that blood donation helps scientific research.

In the U.S., the first COVID-19 infection was reported on January 19, 2020 in a traveler returning from China. These study results show that it’s possible COVID-19 may have been present in the U.S. in December 2019, earlier than previously recognized.

The findings of this study indicate that that it is possible the virus that causes COVID-19 may have been present in California, Oregon, and Washington as early as Dec. 13-16, 2019, and in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin as early as Dec. 30, 2019 - Jan. 17, 2020.

Here is the published paper.

I asked an AI LLM why the authorities promote a Wuhan China origin theory, in spite of this evidence. It gave these arguments for the prevailing wisdom:

The China health authorities genome-sequenced the virus, while the California authorities did not.

The covid-19 antibodies were only found in 2% of the Jan. 2019 California samples, indicating it was not yet widespread.

The California samples were anonymized by the time they got to the Red Cross, so there was no followup on symptoms.

Many medical papers blame racoon dogs and other animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan China.

Studies in journals like Science, Cell, and Nature (including molecular clock analyses) consistently place the origin in Wuhan, with circulation undetected for at most ~1–2 months before the December cluster.

Nobody noticed excess hospital cases or deaths in California in Dec. 2019.

People were traveling out of China at the time, not into China.

I do not see how any of this rebuts a California origin theory. Yes, everyone wanted to blame that Wuhan animal market, but we now know that there was a conspiracy to cover up the possibility of a Wuhan Lab leak.

People were certainly traveling from California to China. Apple computer alone was sending dozens of managers back and forth everyday.

China was much better at responding to the epidemic than the USA. Yes, they did testing while the USA dithered.

I was in California at the time, and people certainly did notice the outbreak of an unusually bad flu-like virus.

All this does not prove covid-19 started in California. Maybe it started somewhere else, spread to California, and spread to Wuhan. There is some evidence of a Wuhan lab leak, and some are convinced by that. Maybe it started with a Wuhan lab leak in Oct. 2019, spread to California, and back to Wuhan. That would be consistent with the genomic papers.

But I think it does prove that the official timeline is wrong. Covid-19 was in California in 2019. It also proves that those who blame China for not responding faster to the epidemic are also wrong. China acted much more promptly than California.

The 2019 California outbreak was blamed on the flu. By Feb. 2020, nothing was blamed on the flu, and all flu-like symptoms were blamed on covid-19. The flu disappeared from official reports.

This makes no sense to me. Covid-19 was a flu-like virus. It could have been called the 2019 flu, but for political reasons. Some flu viruses are worse than others. Covid-19 was particular bad on elderly people with multiple comorbidities, like diabetes and obesity. We should have just called it the flu, and tried to protect the elderly.

There are a lot of covid-19 controversies that were never fully resolved. Did the virus come from pangolin/bat, or a lab leak. If a lab leak, was it accident or deliberate. And was the virus made worse by "gain of function" research. Why was all the advice so bad, regarding hand-washing, masks, social distancing, etc. Why were the schools shut down. Why was the vaccine info so bad. Why don't we have answers, six years later.

Besides all that, no one is even asking about the California outbreak. How is that the covid-19 was so serious that California closed the beaches, but the Dec. 2019 outbreak, whether it was covid-19 or something else, was completely ignored.