I stumbled on a link to this on Twitter. It’s from 2009 or so, but is the first thing I have found that seems to reconcile the disparity between the numbers seen outside China, and the extreme containment efforts in China.
It’s a looooong article, and yes it’s about swine flu, but might as well describe what’s happening with covid19. The authors have doctor in their title, but I didn’t research the credentials, so do what you need to do there.
https://www.psandman.com/col/swineflu2.htm
My take, clearly we didn’t learn from 2009 how to communicate the risk in a pandemic situation. And anything with an Rnought over 2 (maybe even 1) will never be “contained”.