If they had really told the absolute truth do you think america and europe would have been better prepared?
Who knows...would be the common question now, big IF.
For communist regimes, no matter what, they are always in "Competition" with the West that they or their system is better then the West.
So for the above reason, I think they are willing to sacrifice few thousand of their own hoping the news (And the virus) won't get
out of their territory and become what became now (I think they were little too late to kick out Western media, same with the Russians in this case).
Lets not forget Chernobyl (The Russians) , they kept it secret until radioactive clouds started to appear over western Europe, never mind with the
famines they went through during Stalin's and Mao's regimes where the death count was up to 10 to 20 million people .(Who knows about North Korea).
So as long as they can get away with this, they will continue until the West comes up a with a solution/system that triggers instant travel ban or a stop
at first sign or a hint of a major fuck-up like this.
Lets not forget, they got the West by their balls now, almost everything is manufactured in China, the West needs them so badly now that they are
bagging for materials to combat the virus in the West, so I think their system of communism seems to be a "Success"... in their eyes anyway.