Taiwan slammed it’s borders shut before cases got into the country, and hasn’t done much else. Korea adopted large-scale contact tracing and isolation interventions. China uses authoritarian rule to lock people up when they have it. Japan hasn’t tested much at all, kept offices and restaurants open, and never even came close to “stopping“ the virus. And yet, even there, the fatality level isn’t nearly what we’re seeing in the west.
It isn’t unreasonable to hypothesize that something else is going on.
As outlined in [2] I linked to above, Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [1] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. So at least in the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan was not closing the doors. Today, Taiwan has essentially the same 14-days entry quarantine as most countries. Another important difference is that Taiwan takes quarantine very seriously and monitored those sent into quarantine via mobile phone location tracking. That too is outlined in [2]. Police will talk to you if mobile phone movements indicate that 14 day quarantine is violated. In contrast, quarantine is de facto voluntary in many European countries.
There is no good reason as far as I can see, why other countries don't adopt similar policies.
I must admit, I am not pleased that I am loosing 1 year of my life because the countries that I live in are not adopting best practises. Indeed, are mostly not even aware of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship)
[2] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
Is it that? Is it that simple? Those are honest questions.
Characterizing quarantines as “locking people up” seems to me the root cause of the mass deaths in the West. The iconography of individualism has trumped the idea that walking around expelling a cloud of deadly material makes you a threat against the life and liberty of others.