My read from the US is different. I think over the past 20 years Americans have seen coverage of many scary diseases from afar (SARS, west nile, zika, MERS, ebo

My read from the US is different. I think over the past 20 years Americans have seen coverage of many scary diseases from afar (SARS, west nile, zika, MERS, ebola). None of these had a large impact on American society. So these experiences have led Americans, not wholly unreasonably, to not pay much attention to a new infectious disease in a faraway place. I doubt it comes down to thinking America is somehow “better”. If anything, people seem more inclined to envy the coordinated responses of Asian countries, especially South Korea.