The thing with covid was it caught everyone by surprise. It’s not like the US even caught on first. It devastated Italy before we even flinched, so that alone is evidence that, at least for the US response, we would have gone to shit no matter who warned us.
The counterfactual is hard to reason about. SARS-1 was contained because international travel was restricted immediately after the first few cases. Once you seed multiple countries with it, competence matters for little.
Sars 1 made it to the US and many countries. Short story was it was contained because it was much more deadly, and transmission was tied to symptoms so it was more easily detected.
