Let's leave Vietnam out of this. They're not hiding their numbers. It's difficult for the rest of the world to admit this, but Vietnam beat the virus because their leadership acted quickly, ruthlessly and over time.

In the early days of the outbreak Vietnam didn't have rigorous contact tracing setup, so if a case turned out positive they simply shut down the entire neighborhood for two weeks. Once the source was mostly international cases, they also shut their borders and made no exceptions, not even for trading partners begging to let a handful of people in. But most importantly, even when case numbers went down into single digits, they kept up total lockdown for an additional two weeks.

This saved them from making the mistake Korea made in removing social distancing restrictions the day before a major 5 day weekend which seeded the country and we've been squashing spot fires here ever since.

Authoritarian regimes that have earned public trust through effective governance are probably the countries best suited to manage a pandemic like this one. It's just there are very few of them so it's hard to think of such countries as a category.