Their success is, I think, highly correlated to their mass testing campaigns. South Korea had drive-through testing facilities up within 48 hours of the outbreak, so they knew exactly how the virus spread and who to quarantine or not.

Add to this an existing culture of using face masks and gloves in public (i.e. supplies of those things were already in place), and you've got a very different scenario compared to most of Europe for example.

Masks seem significantly more important than tests.

Hard to make the argument that testing is of primary importance considering Japan did almost none and still didn't see a significant outbreak.

> Add to this an existing culture of using face masks and gloves in public (i.e. supplies of those things were already in place), and you've got a very different scenario compared to most of Europe for example.

This is a big one. Around these parts wearing a mask means people assume you're sick or immunocompromised.

Japan, South Korea managed the outbreak by testing/tracing and no lockdowns. Exactly.

Obviously Sweden couldn’t scale to the same testing as e.g South Korea, but few countries could. Perhaps one lesson would be that if you can’t scale testing then locking down until you can would be good?

Japan definitely did not do test and trace.

Japan did 90%+ mask coverage.

why could they not scale testing?