I've started to think that the common discussions of Asia's Covid-19 experience need to split 'success' countries into two categories. There seems to be too much focus on Taiwan & NZ, which are obviously doing best but whose outcomes it's not possible for Europe & US to emulate.

Seems like Japan and South Korea are the ones you'd want to look at most closely. More populous, have never really managed to get the outbreak down to zero, but have suppressed it very heavily (notably without national shelter in place orders). Pining after NZ outcomes pointless.

If you look by something like the Google Mobility data, it seems London has been far more restricted relative to normal than Tokyo this year (messy visualisation but I hope the point comes across), and yet the case and death outcomes are orders of magnitude better in Tokyo.

I took the point in February that these countries had better systems in place for dealing with epidemic outbreaks because of SARS and MERS, but even then it was used to cover abject failure in large parts of Europe and North America, and far moreso now.