That's correct. They had around a month actually, but only 10-11 of those days accounting for timezones were between December 1st to 31st, so they would in fact have been exempt from January's AC as most of the hiatus days were in the period that January's AC would have been.

Tl;dr: Minimum for full exemption is 14 days within the month of the AC, not before that month and not after. Hope that helps.