yes, like Taiwan who 1. did learn the lesson from SARS and did immediate quarantine upon just hearing (i.e. de-facto using modern communication technology) about some strange flu appearing in China. 2. Used modern technology to do contact tracing. 3. Quickly scaled up extensive testing - again modern science and technology. Most places did nothing like these 3 steps. Those steps weren't available centuries ago and could have prevented the covid from becoming pandemic.

Another noticeable difference is that Taiwan actions were real actions where the government did actually performed them whereis typical "actions" we see around like lockdown and masks are just government orders without the governments actually doing anything.