For me "countries that did really well" is mainly places like Singapore and Taiwan and South Korea, which got the virus earlier than USA and Europe but took it seriously from the very start.

Okay, if they actually got the virus that early, then these countries are the answer to my question.

However... at least for Taiwan that doesn't feel like it adds up:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan

They've had fewer than 1700 cases, and that's including a recent massive outbreak. They peaked on March 26th 7-day average with 21 cases a day. Granted, the US took maybe a couple more weeks to ramp up to its first plateau, so maybe if it was caught here a few weeks earlier it would have made all the difference. But it feels a lot more like Taiwan just didn't have a lot of travel to and from Wuhan?

If you travel to Taiwan, even as a Taiwanese citizen, you must stay in an official quarantine hotel for 14 days. You are not asked to do this - you are taken to the hotel by an official quarantine taxi driver and there are records of all this. You are not allowed to leave the hotel for any reason - food is delivered to your door 3x per day, and you can ask for certain things. My sister in law did this. That is just one of over 100 strategies employed by Taiwan to reduce virus spread.

The current Vice President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, has a Master's degree in Public Health from Harvard. The previous VP, Chen Chien-jen, has a Master's degree in Public Health from National Taiwan University. Taiwan takes public health seriously, especially after the original SARS experience.

Nobody in Taiwan thinks the virus is a "scam" or that masks are a "tool of oppression." Even before the pandemic masks were totally common. There is complete public buy-in on masks without even having to be asked. Some of my friends work in a clinic in Taipei so I hear updates. I was also in Taiwan last year for a month. The difference in attitude between the US and Taiwan is startling. If the US had acted like Taiwan, instead of acting in a way that was indistinguishable from sabotage, we'd have a lot fewer deaths and would have avoided a recession.

Taiwan resident here. Just wanted to include that “massive outbreak” so far means a few hundred cases nationally.

That’s bad, it might get a lot worse, and we’re all nervous — but just wanted to add the context because “massive” can mean a lot of things with orders of magnitude difference.

Yep, I only meant that relative to how you've been doing. Obviously y'all are still doing fantastic compared to others. Best of luck.

BTW is there a vaccination drive over there? That's got to calm things down somewhat right?

Rapid and strict incoming travel restrictions were a key part of "taking it seriously from the very start" with a big impact on future outcome.

There are all kinds of effective measures (e.g. contact tracing, quarantining of unconfirmed suspect cases) that work when you have 20 cases a day and don't work when you have 2000 cases a day, so going all-in while you still have just a few cases works, because by the time you have many cases, it's too late.

Mainland Chinese citizens are not allowed to travel to Taiwan as individual tourists since July 2019. This was interpreted as an attempt to hurt tourism and so the economy at the time. May have been a factor.

Don’t forget Vietnam. One of the best responses!

It started in China, a country with 1.4 billion people and 20 million pop cities and even if you 100x their official number they did better than the US or Europe. There's few excuses for our mismanagement.

That is an even less fair comparison. The Chinese government has a tremendous amount of power over the daily life of its citizens in a way that isn't replicable most other places. There were stories of China literally welding doors to apartment buildings shut and forcibly dragging people away to quarantine facilities as soon as they tested positive.

FWIW from a brief search months ago it seemed that the welding stories are hearsay. Iirc you can find reference to them in the news but it didn't sound concrete.

I did some searching and it looks like you are right that there isn't anyone credible officially reporting it. However multiple credible news sources do mention welding doors shut as part of opinion pieces, including this one from Ai Weiwei[1] who presumably has more info about the situation and isn't going to simply speak on Western hearsay.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...

Yes, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread the strictness of the Chinese lockdown has been exaggerated in the media/Western imagination.

There were literal videos about it at the same time ( a year ago)

I recall seeing various grainy creepy videos (not just about this) supposedly of China posted on Twitter. I started to wonder who was really pushing these videos. I'd have to see a video corroborated by a reasonably trusted news source.

Eg News sources of the BBC had conflicts of interest about reporting on this ( since they have/had a division in China).

What would even be framed in the media when these were really user videos without journalists. Journalists couldn't report live, so i don't think there's something else than opinion pieces.

How important is a head start though in these situations? If the response was poor in either case, the result would be poor, right?

If the US had in reality on the order of 100 cases, there could be a credible effort to get rid of all of them and reopen. You wouldn't have to lock down hardcore for as long. In Australia from what I've seen fly across Twitter, they had the luxury of periodically locking down a city when they saw a single case, to make sure it didn't escape into the population.

I agree that there could be a way for this to work in the US but it would be a long slog. South Korea seems like they could pull it off. So I'll grant you them for sure as being superior.

The real question - how many countries did well that were at the center of the prior SARS and bird flu outbreaks of the past?

As I understand, SARS 1 and MERS are much less contagious than SARS 2.

But much more fatal. These countries had two rounds of practice in controlling a major epidemic.