Denti
Agree, but it's very hard to get any info on the level of testing being done in each country and the way the test group is being selected.
The exemplar for testing is South Korea who have one of the lowest growth rates of all the "early in country transmission" countries and do roughly 10,000 tests a day and quarantine anyone who tests positive (until recently the TOTAL test count for the US was just over 11,000).
About a year after this all settles there will be some great papers on the things we should have spotted in the data early on but didn't. Right now we're instrument flying on a partial panel at best....
The UCL site was the first one I'd seen that showed some level of "like for like" analysis across countries. Learning should be "If you are N days behind Italy on the curve use those N days aggressively and wisely".
Much as I love my personal freedom I think history is going to show that benign dictatorship is a better model for dealing with pandemics then free market forces...
IMHO - others will have a different take on all this.