Agreed, and with regard to the controls in particular, I would add that SK has an astonishing surveillance system of the people. The US simply does not have such an infrastructure (thank God!) To equal just part of it, adjusted for NYC’s population, I estimated on an older thread that you’d have 70 MILLION cameras in NYC, monitoring people’s public movements.
I also think SK literally had more “respect” throughout the gov’t and the people for this sort of potential outbreak, and they also did not have our early testing glitch. The “glitch” may not have been anyone’s fault, but in terms of preparedness of plans alone, CDC was quite caught off guard: Being on guard is their business, IMO.
The Korean populace is well organized and obey government edicts. The Germans are doing far better than Italy, Spain, and France. Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan have performed well. The character and cohesion of a society matters.
CDC is a bureaucracy. They tried to maintain total oversight over a situation that was spinning out of control. They didn’t have the tools to do the job. Their first attempt at a test failed because of a defective reagent. And there was no ability to conduct mass testing. Trump essentially fired them and turned to the private sector. The results have been spectacular. The silver lining is that we now have a testing protocol that is the best in the world and could serve us well for the next pandemic or bio terrorism attack.
The CDC needs to be reformed and repurposed. It has suffered from mission creep.