There's a lot of winging it that's been going on in the US. Asia went through this with SARS, so immediately implemented what they learned during the worst of that that finally allowed them to control it. They went from zero to 100 in seconds, so to say. Here in the US, we've never encountered something so infectious in anyone's lifetime. (Not since 1918) How things like lockdown combine with masks, contact tracing, etc. is being figured out here still. I think they were preparing as if there was no effect of the lockdown. We got 80k deaths with the lockdown nationwide and I recall doctors saying before that if the lockdown worked it would seem like we over-reacted.