I think part of that is that this isn't their first pandemic. They learned how to survive SARS, so just put into place the same gameplan that eventually worked. Here in the US we had such a plan based on theirs, but the new president hates the one who created it so much (and is a sociopath who cares not a lick for human suffering) so still refuses to follow it. There has been an us vs them politicization of fighting the disease, and even accepting science as something useful, in this country that is hampering the response. I can't say what happened in Europe, but that's the US.