[makomk]

Well, how hard countries were hit early on seems to heavily depend on distance from Italy and the amount of travel from there. There was a very noticeable gradient in Europe with Italy as the epicenter as I recall. (A lot of media coverage talked about Taiwan etc doing well despite lots of travel from China, but that seems to be a bit of a red herring - for whatever reason, almost all countries did pretty well at holding back the initial wave of cases from China, even the USA. Genomic tracing suggests it was Covid spreading from Europe to New York and then to the rest of the country that did the US in. Quite likely from Italy, given the timing of New York Fashion Week.) Then the countries with big initial outbreaks never really managed to recover, though dodging the worst of it initially didn't guarantee future success.

Australia and New Zealand are of course an awful lot closer geographically to Taiwan, Japan and Korea than they are to Europe - and there's a huge variation between all those countries in terms of the other things you might think affect Covid, like willingness to lock down, culture, level of testing, etc..