What if it was a planned pandemic?

I've never been much of a conspiracy theorist until just recently. I'd always suspected that most were hatched by individuals that were somewhat 'unbalanced'. As a result, I've mostly ignored such posts and moved on to more realistic thoughts.

That pretty much described me until just recently. The more I gave thought to the coronavirus pandemic, the more questions began to emerge. Let me tick off a few weird thoughts;

1. This virus was both novel and highly infectious. Something the Chinese government must have been well aware of as far back as November 2019. As it rapidly spread, the rest of the world heard little until late in December when the viral spread was already out of control. (This sounded more like an 'engineered' release as the Chinese had normally reacted much faster in notifying the World Heath Organization such as when the last SARS outbreak occurred).
2. The US media totally downplayed the threat for a very long time, noting publicly that the US was in little to no danger. This flies directly in the face of past experience. Thankfully, President Trump took action even as the Democrats advised against restricting travel to and from China. Had the President hesitated, many more would have become infected. Score one against the Democrats.
3. As we entered into February, and as the total number of infections were still pretty low, the mainstream media channels did not give much airtime to the problem. That changed however, in March when the junk rag media (stations like CNN and MSNBC), began to capitalize on stories that were almost always hyped out of proportion, while at the same time bashing the Trump administration. End result, America and Americans become even more divided (if that was even possible)!
4. For and 'accidental release', the coronavirus has resulted in a couple of remarkable end results; World economic destabilization combined with an improved world trade position for the Chinese government across the board! A pretty good result for not firing a single shot!

Currently, as we were approaching the end of March 2020, the future didn't look all that great for millions of people all over the world. The disease infection rate was still spiking, people were increasingly dying, medical resources were stretched to their limits, societal disruption was commonplace and there was the specter of a coming winter that could see the disease re-appear on a periodic basis. And, I asked myself..... Who would have gained by such a strange scenario? My far out there in never-land answer... A joint coalition between elements of the Chinese government working with elements of the Democratic Party and a leftist mass media to overthrow the current balance of power would be a good start. If America imploded and our current government failed, this would be a perfect opening for an iron-fisted socialist dictatorship to seize control and then work with China to expand a new globalist socialist empire such as the world has never seen.

Now of course, there's also the very real chance that all this mess was just due to a series of; bad political choices, sloppy human and animal overcrowding, inept World Heath Organization oversight, too late-too little containment responses, a virus with unheard of contagious rates and mass disinformation. Yeah, I guess that's also possible....