I dunno, California and Washington seem to be doing a better job than most, and they were the first hit in the US. First community transmission case was in CA, first death was in WA. And yet, it's places like NY, NJ, LA, and MI on the other side of the country who are having an issue with hospitals being overrun. The Bay Area took the lead on shelter in place orders and they don't have the situation NYC has. What if they took it as seriously as CA and WA?. US and South Korea reported their first cases on the same day with very different outcomes. What if the US responded like South Korea instead of the way it did?
You seem to be suggesting that the right response is unknowable ahead of time. But the people who listened to epidemiologists early had better outcomes, so it seems like we did know what to do -- we just didn't want to or were in denial. I just don't see how given that any slack is warranted in the aftermath of this.
There's a wide range of measures that lead to effectively no infection. You have no way of knowing that the "correct" measures were taken, only that measures at least as expensive as necessary were taken. They could well be far more expensive than necessary.
That's the future-history perspective, too, where we assume that we can already count them as having successfully contained the disease; in the here-and-now perspective, there's plenty of time for it to develop that they in fact didn't do enough either and will explode in disease in the next two weeks or something. Or months. Or, in the worst scenario, years. (See Spanish Flu history, as you've probably seen cited; what we know of as the "Spanish Flu" was not the original outbreak, but a later one.)
