[JamesBarney]

The handling in the UK was bungled as well. But most of the countries we are doing better than had community spread much earlier than us and we had the giant advantage of seeing what happened in Italy and preparing.

I think if community spread had started as early as in the U.S. as those countries I think we'd be in a much worse spot than many of them.

[earthtourist]

Everyone knew what was happening in China. The starting line was the same for all countries. I became 100% sure we were in for a hospital-overrunning pandemic by mid-January. I can tell because that's when I started emailing friends/family telling them to stock up for a quarantine.

[JamesBarney]

If you assume everyone had the same starting line then that makes the u.s. look even worse because we still haven't locked down as hard as necessary to slow down the virus.