Spain and Italy seem to be doing pretty well so far.
I believe they have finally implemented testing, case tracking and warning people who may have been exposed. As far as I know, all of the countries that have controlled the epidemic use these techniques. In April, Spain and other EU countries starting using the kind of cell phone apps used in Korea and New Zealand:
How do COVID-19 tracing apps work and what kind of data do they use?
https://www.bbva.com/en/how-do…kind-of-data-do-they-use/
As I have often moaned, Georgia has not implemented these things. So it is probably heading for trouble. Some people in the state government have cited the need for these things, and said they will implement them, but as far as I know they have not done it. It may be that social distancing and people staying home will keep things in check. Unfortunately, the R0 remains stuck at ~1. If it stays this way, and it takes a year for a vaccine to be deployed, 11,000 people will die needlessly. A sacrifice to ignorance and stupidity.
Just about every editorial and news article about the pandemic these days talks about case tracking. The message is finally getting through. In the U.S., 90,000 people have died. If we had implemented these things in March, only a few thousand would have died. I think this is the worst mistake in the history of U.S. medicine and technology, and the most incompetent act of any administration. We have lost more people in previous disasters, such as the 1918 pandemic. That was unavoidable. More people died from lung cancer caused by cigarettes. That was criminal. I do not know of any case in which 90,000 people died and the economy was devastated because the president and his advisers were idiots who would not do what dozens of other countries have done.
It is astounding to me that ~49% of Americans think Trump has done a good job handling the pandemic. Don't they read the newspapers? Don't they realize that Japan, for example, has completely controlled the pandemic, ~30 new cases per day? They have had 773 deaths. If it takes another year more to develop a vaccine, they will have 160 more deaths (0.6 per day). Japan's population is 1/3rd of the U.S. If we implemented the steps they took, and Greece and a dozen other countries took, we would have no need for a shutdown, and our total deaths for a year would be ~5,000.
HHS Sec. Azar said that the U.S. rates are higher than Japan because our population has more health problems, such as obesity, and we have unhealthy minority groups that have been neglected such as black people and Native Americans. He is right about that. We do have more health problems. But that has nothing to do with infection rate! You are infected just as easily whether you are healthy or obese, black or white. Only the outcome is affected. Per capita, U.S. citizens are infected 300 times more often than Japanese people. We are not 300 times less healthy. The problem is, the disease is more widespread and uncontrolled, so we are 300 times more likely to encounter a contagious person.
Azar also complained that Japan does not test as much per capita, so they don't know how many cases they have, and they probably have a bunch more hidden ones. That's wrong. If they had hidden cases, they would see more people infected from unknown, untraceable sources. At the peak of the epidemic a few weeks ago, they did see that. Today there are practically no untraceable cases. There is no need to test many people per capita when there are only 30 new cases a day and you know where all 30 came from. We need millions of tests because we have 25,000 new cases a day, and most are from unknown people. Or, at least, the government does not know. The patients may know the infection came from their spouse or co-worker, but the government is not keeping track.
