They did a horrible job in the beginning and a good job in the end. They wasted december and january (both for themselves and the world) but the february response was quite effective. https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop... is an informative illustration.

Right now, the USA response is somewhere between those two China approaches but it seems that it has been closer to the "early China" response than to the "late China" response.