I have a Google news alert set for "SARS" - it's many years old, I set it a few years after SARS (2003-2005) because I had become really interested it. It started pinging in 2012 when MERS first jumped to humans.
https://saintsreport.com/threads/mers-new-sars-like-virus-spreading-and-killing.287524/
After MERS was contained, I didn't get many Google news emails about it, so I never turned it off. Every now and then a new study would come out and it would ping for a week or so, but it wasn't often. That was about from 2014 to the end of last year.
It started pinging on this virus on December 31. That was when China formally reported to the WHO a novel coronavirus infection in Wuhan. It was daily news after that and by mid-January, the Chinese outbreak had infected people abroad. The mainstream media was dropping stories about it from time to time in the first half of January, but medical and science media was on it more intensely. The virus's genome analysis was first posted for study on open-source virology sites in early January.
News and academia were on it by the first of the year, and I think there are US intelligence reports of noting activity in Wuhan relating to a viral outbreak several weeks earlier. The first travel restrictions went up in the third week of January.
There's an objective record here, and it shows just how much information was available in January, in February, and in March. It's a lot. Even this thread demonstrates a lot of it.