I've mentioned many times that they learned their lessons from the SARS outbreak, and the US will learn from the corona virus outbreak, if we're smart - which remains to be seen.
I stand my statement up thread concerning the value of the observation made by USFRIENDINVICTORIA. If you know of any instance where this isn't true, please let us all know. Deer rifle ownership numbers excluded, of course.
Not wearing masks during contagious outbreaks only helps the contagion spread more. Your statement, "For Taiwan at least they did it using intrusive methods not generally possible here in the USA.", is false. While not since the Spanish flu outbreak has the US faced such a massive and deadly contagion, US localities have always had the means, authority, and laws on the books to deal with communicable diseases.
Controlling this would gone better if left to those same local and state agencies, if expressly ordered to do so and given proper guidelines. The CDC, NIH, FDA, have sorely underperformed in their mission to protect the health of Americans - to be kind. They don't know what they're doing. Practically every advice and action by these federal agencies was wrong - especially stopping the distribution/sales of the masks still available in the country at the time, not immediately sealing our borders, not ensuring for proper collection and availability of data, stopping the economy, ...
Our so called "experts" should have been on a teleconference with Korea, asking what to do. I seriously doubt Korea was on the phone to us, asking what to do - as claimed, as our token healthcare "experts" were claiming masks were ineffective while half the populations of Asian countries can be seen wearing them in the streets. Sorry it the truth stings - I hate f'n liars - especially when governments lie to cover someone's sorry ass. Our CDC is worse than worthless, having even helped to fund the creation of this viral killer in the first place. If heads don't literally roll, you can be assured that our POTUS has been assimilated by the Borg.
After reading many of the flubro's comments and seeing the news reports about those wanting to open up, not the economy, but concerts and sporting events, where large masses of people gather, and how it's their constitutional right NOT to wear a mask, I realize we in the US still haven't learned our lesson.
So, while Korea had zero fatalities yesterday, and their economy is getting back on track; barring a cure, the fight against the virus will go on in the US. Much of the gains we've made will be lost. More will die, more of the economy will shut down, food shortages will become widespread, etc, and I will need to redo the ending daily fatality index for my US projection, as I'm pretty sure it will be falling even further short of its previous estimation of fatalities in the US.
Just my 2 cents...YMMV.
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.