This is absurd. The US did exactly one of the many things that were required, and then did nothing else for a full month. Other countries did more of what was required early and defeated the virus.
This is exactly the sentiment of the parent comment. How can we let the US leadership off the hook by just shrugging and saying, hey, they did slightly more than absolutely nothing. This was avoidable and the US did not take the well-understood public health measures required to avoid it.
Name one, just one country comparable to the US in population and the mobility of their population that did well. Once the virus got in, and remained undetected for a few weeks, it's too late to trace it like they did in South Korea (a tiny country with a very homogeneous population).
It's easy to judge it in hindsight, but think of it from US or most EU countries' governments perspective. You got barely any infections locally. The number of infections in China at the end of January was under 10K (a country with the population of over a billion). China just started their quarantine a week ago (23rd of Jan). Is it reasonable to quarantine the whole country at this point? I don't think so. Italy waited for a whole month to start theirs.
What is a reasonable set of actions in this scenario, in your opinion?
One country? Brazil. 200 million people. We started lockdowns very early when there were very few cases. The usually very busy streets outside my apartment have been mostly empty for well over two months now. I've lost track. But not of the fact that we have a fraction of the deaths that the US has had. No thanks to the president here, but thankfully the vast majority of people here are ignoring him and following the advice of state and city leaders.
Why, when the virus had circulating for weeks, did we only have 7 confirmed cases? Because the CDC massively messed up the testing regime on several levels: only testing people with travel or links to travel, not having nearly enough tests due to major slip-ups in development, etc.
Why was the CDC such a disaster this time? We don’t really know yet, but there was clearly a failure of leadership there. I don’t know whether Trump is to blame or not, but the Republican denigration of government as ineffective appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
IMO the key issue that caused it to spread so much in the US is there weren't restrictions on mobility. If borders were closed between states, and stricter lockdowns were put in place in hot spots, it could have been controlled.
A lot of smaller European countries are starting to get to the same point as NZ because that's exactly what they did - they restricted travel between borders and required any citizens returning home to self-quarantine. In a lot of places people regularly travel across borders for work, shopping, leisure etc, so Europe as a whole can be compared to the US in this matter. In my country they did this before even the first death, and two months later life is now starting to return to normal.
Along the same lines, it's not surprising that larger countries like Italy, Spain, France and the UK have a worse outbreak, as they put few restrictions on travel domestically and what they did was too late.
This is exactly the sentiment of the parent comment. How can we let the US leadership off the hook by just shrugging and saying, hey, they did slightly more than absolutely nothing. This was avoidable and the US did not take the well-understood public health measures required to avoid it.