So tell me how it would be possible in the USA for the government to create a database linking everyone's health records to their travel records and personal household data in one day?
If you read the material I provided links to you would know that:
"On January 27, the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) and the National Immigration Agency integrated patients’ past 14-day travel history with their NHI identification card data from the NHIA; this was accomplished in 1 day. Taiwan citizens’ household registration system and the foreigners’ entry card allowed the government to track individuals at high risk because of recent travel history in affected areas."
No such databases officially exist in the United States. If they did, then the approach used so successfully in Taiwan to do tracking and isolation could have been done here too. But we don't have those kind of intrusive federal databases here in the United States.
Mask wearing clearly helps if the mask happens to intercept and trap an airborne pathogen you are exposed to.
You don't have to convince me of the ineptness of government responses all our our country. The CDC, DIA, and the CIA should have had accurate data from Wuhan long before the rest of us got it from Twitter or other reports from Chinese social media. And as you noted governments at all levels here did a lousy job of intercepting virus carriers from Europe and elsewhere.
That said, the impact of mask wearing as a factor that lead to the success in Korea and Taiwan is probably not nearly as important as the other steps they took.
There's no need to recreate something which already exists. There are additional data elements needed, or reserved data fields put to use. Reporting standards and information requirements need work, portal and query systems implemented. Extremely minor tasks for an agency of the US government with a multiple billion dollar budget. Seven days would be more than enough time to begin collecting information relevant in the fight given a small team of IT specialists with presidential authority.
I've done similar implementations. Not to the scale this would requite, but certainly within similar time constraints. Not bragging, but I remember one particular instance when a website I developed under a very short time limit, which used geospatial data was demo'd to some government VIPs while I was finishing the backend, and gave the word over the phone to go ahead and click the link to display such and such information on the big screen.
It's not rocket science. Or even hard to do today. There is no excuse for the CDC not to have the above already in place. In fact, I'd call it dereliction of duty.
You would be astounded at the amount of information in digital form that exists on you, not to mention other information