South Korea , Hong Kong, Taiwan had an earlier start, has a smaller population and territory to deal with, and generally are civically more obedient when it comes health issues having experienced SARS. US has not experienced something like this since 1918 and not only was the Federal government in denial, so were many local government. Look at how the mayor of Las Vegas handled this. Even when NY, CA, WA states were showing large infections, somehow the Las Vegas mayor thought Las Vegas would somehow be immune to this despite Las Vegas being a top tourist destination for lots of Asians. There’s got to be more than enough exposures to all the travel back and forth similar to the travel between Washington/CA and China. But even then, Las Vegas mayor insisted on keeping things open longer than it probably should have….because the mayor knows the financial impact of shutting down is astronomical, and while casinos are mostly well capitalized, this would trigger an enormous wave of job losses that would not be recoverable in the near term, and impact the individual small businesses , people, and real estate that are completely hinged on this one industry. Unfortunately, it’s simply unrealistic to expect things to have simply gone away and avoided Vegas. And the late delay in Vegas is probably going to make it a lot worse now that in all likelihood the industry in Vegas will need to stay shutdown a lot longer .

If the federal government mandated an shutdown as early as January, people would have been complaining about why our federal government is encroaching on our rights and ruining the economy when we haven’t even been affected by this virus. The mayor of Vegas would have been on the top of list of complainers.