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Those countries have been more successful overall in limiting the spread of covid. In the US it's pretty much out of control in many areas. You can send kids back to school if community spread is limited and you can do effective contact tracing - but neither of those things is true in the US.

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Also, a lot of countries have far more centralized authority to figure things out.

Actually neither Japan nor Germany have a central govt authority similar to the CDC, and they are far outperforming the US response.

> Actually neither Japan nor Germany have a central govt authority similar to the CDC, and they are far outperforming the US response.

But Germany, at least, has functioning nonspecialist central government authorities that are trying to do the right thing. Even if the US government has the right kind of specialists, it's dysfunctional as a central authority.

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