Exponential growth is a weird thing. All these countries worked very hard at the start of the epidemic to bring it under control and were successful. The stat

Exponential growth is a weird thing. All these countries worked very hard at the start of the epidemic to bring it under control and were successful. The state of Victoria in Australia is the best example of this. After initial elimination, it started to get out of control and so they entered a very strict 112 day lockdown until community transmission went to zero. Since then most Australian states have done similar (but shorter) lockdowns, again until community transmission is zero. When community transmission is very low (<100 cases) things like contact tracing work, communities support short lockdowns etc. Once it gets out of control many control processes become useless, and exponential growth takes over.