It's not so much about having their shit together as having a terrifying autocratic government of the kind the UK government are still pretending (unconvincingly) they don't dream of emulating.

Also there may well be areas of China where the virus never reached. I gather internal travel isn't massively widespread, and the severity of the lockdowns they imposed exceeded anything seen in the US or UK.

I haven't compared the severity of lockdowns or intensity of travel in China and other countries. I've never been to China. But, I've read that it's a very complex society with tons of different ethnic groups, massive inequality, massive migration waves back to the cities and forth, massive problems like tuberculosis rate 20x the TB rate in the States, so saying how they just lock every single human down seems like a bit of an oversimplification to me. But what do i know.

There is no silver bullet here - China is not exactly your friendly democracy.

Also beware that there are reports of China having started vaccinations long before safety and efficacy results.

The flipside of exponential growth is exponential fall: In the best case if you can eliminate all social contact for 5-14 days the virus is essentially gone. But very few Western democracies are able to agree on super strict lockdowns, and if they do, they need their neighbouring countries to follow.

The difference is that the US, EU and UK are highly individualistic democracies, where governments are really weak at enforcing anything. It's no surprise that they suck at handling disease compared to societies with effective authoritarian governance.

Individuals who don't care exist everywhere, but in China government can force them to do the right thing. In the West it can't do that easily. I guess it's the price of individual freedoms.

Do you even remember the early responses from these countries? If you do that does not sound that unlikely

I remember China had uncontrolled community spread for about a month and a half before even admitting there was a new virus, let alone taking action (earliest confirmed case was backtracked to mid-November).

After china finally admitted it and spoke out warnings, america did not admit its dangerious for months to come, some european countries basically run the same shit campaign. Splitting society more than anything else in recent history