First off, keep the script going and absolutely copyright your premise, script, characters, or idea. The old fashioned, pre-Internet, cheap way to do that was to mail a copy to yourself and not open it. The postmark served as proof of copyright. Nowadays, I'm sure there are plenty of high tech ways to copyright ideas, premises, characters, or full-blown scripts. Do it!

What's going to happen here is that after all the dust settles in, say a year (or ten), movies and novels of all sorts are going to come out en masse, and in great quantity over the course of generations to come, many of them not being kind to China. So get that copyright.

In a sense, this forum serves as proof of your idea, but do some research. I can't imagine Formosahut standing up in court against Netflix!

I heard second hand that there was a lot of speculation in the Chinese language press during the initial outbreak regarding the possibility that the virus occurred in more than one place simultaneously, which always seemed absurd to me. That makes no sense. Of course, the Chinese would love to pass this off as having originated somewhere else. What I see as a more likely scenario is that the Chinese simply managed to contain this longer than the world thought, beginning as early as July or August of 2019.

The Italians assumed these increased rates of pneumonia were due to the flu; why wouldn't they? It took this virus getting very, very deeply entrenched in the population before it could no longer be covered up or ignored. This all gets back to a very low mortality rate, comparable to, say SARS 1, and the ability to spread very easily among people with no symptoms. I'm pretty sure I had it back in February, long before this part of Japan was even concerned about it.

This is like a toenail fungus that may disappear, but never really goes away.

"In a lab escape scenario, yes it's possible that lab actors may have been aware that it had escaped, and kept it quiet hoping it would be ok. It's equally possible they weren't aware it had escaped.

In a deliberate leak scenario, yes, you would want to keep it under your hat as long as possible. The problem i see with this theory is that if i was going to deliberately leak it, i wouldn't do it right next to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In the movie script i was writing, the only way i could reconcile this is if it was designed for say release in HK, to suppress the protest for example, then there was a slip betwixt lip and cup, and it got out in Wuhan instead."

There's another option. Or multiple. Let's explore four sets of lab characters:
Set 1: Lab characters NOT privy to any information that work on the virus was happening.
Set 2: Lab characters aware that work on the virus was a thing but NOT privy to any other information, and NOT aware that it escaped, but of course they'll find out.
Set 3: Lab characters that WERE aware that it escaped but thought it was an accident.
Set 4: Lab characters that WERE aware that it escaped while on transfer to HK where it was to be released.

The point here is that, in such a lab, of course there is going to be a hierarchy of "need to know" characters. The difficulty with regards to a script is going to be how much of that complexity to include.