I call bullshit. Look at Australia and New Zealand’s data. First world, excellent tracing and reporting. Both had very similar strategies and reaction times.
Compare with Sweden.
Australia and New Zealand both have always been outliers on any virus propagation and a lot of that has to do with the generally low population density outside of a few urban built-up areas.
Australia 3.1 people per square kilometer, total population 25,467,000.
New Zealand 18 per square kilometer, total population 4,886,000
Sweden 24 people per square kilometer total population 10,230,000
USA 36 people per square kilometer total population 328,200,000
New Zealand didn't have its first local transmission reported until March 5th. A full month after it had denied entry to New Zealand from China on Feb 3rd.
Australia didn't have its first local transmission reported until March 2nd. Feb 1st banned entry to Australia from China. Australia started closing down its non-essential services on March 22nd.
Jan 14th WHO said preliminary investigations conducted by Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. Jan 20th was confirmed human to human transmissions was possible.
USA Feb 2 travel restrictions from China. End of March and early April stay at home quarantines implemented. It is theorized that the virus was in the USA as early as November where Michael Melham tested positive for antibodies and said he came down sick after a convention in Atlantic City in November. Prior to this, the first reported local transmission was Jan 30th .
Sweden first reported local transmission was March March 6th. March 13th Sweden implemented measures to delay the spread among the population and to protect the elderly. In mid April 1/3rd of the 1300 who had died were living in nursing homes.
This is all to show that it wasn't about the excellent tracking and reporting until New Zealand and Australia are testing a large percent of their population weekly they will not truly know who is and is not infected. They also benefited from generally lower populations and spread out population centers which hamper the transmission of the virus, coupled with a long time before first reported local transmission meant they had more time to prepare.
It will still be interesting to see if Australia will be able to stomp out the virus or if it will continue to slowly burn in the cities for the next year.