Both MERS and SARS have animal reservoirs, both were squashed by competent international efforts led by the United States.
We were going into month 4 of the pandemic at this point a year ago, so it was quite possibly already too late, but I'd still like the chance to re-run the simulation replacing Trump with a normal dipshit GOP (without Trump there is no Mike Flynn and no Q).
Trump completely shit in the well with China and created an environment of blatant hostility between the governments. He compounded that by pulling the CDC out of China, including cancelling a position that trained Chinese field epidemiologists. Her position was cancelled effective Sept 2019, after she found out, she left in July 2019.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-cdc-cut-health-expert-job-china-months-before-coronavirus-2020-3?op=1
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2020-03-25/exclusive-us-slashed-cdc-staff-inside-china-prior-to-coronavirus-outbreak
Even with that, Trump knew exactly how bad this was in January and blatantly lied. That doesn't happen with a normal GOP. Any other President in US history gets to work on isolating and eradicating Covid the second they find out about it. In January, there was still a good chance to contain this.
Add in all the Trump political appointees and his overriding his own public health experts, poltical control of the CDC, fucked relationships with the WHO and the EU. None of that happens under a normal GOP President.
I'm barely scratching the surface and don't want to prolong it, but It's impossible to overstate how much and how many ways Trump fucked our ability to respond.