>Only tangentially related, but during the height of the Covid crisis I remember Taiwan's response was particularly efficient

I think it's pretty related on the cultural side. If you look at how Taiwan succeeded, it's basically two fold. On the population's side it was willingness to follow orders, wear masks, get tracked using a smartphone app if you were sick and they were pretty damn strict about this. In particular mask wearing is a common courtesy in much of East Asia long before covid.

On the tech/politics side they were lucky to have people like Audrey Tang. But let's put it that way the chances that the US put a trans hacker who writes Perl implementations in Haskell for fun in a top cabinet position and for Americans to accept East Asian levels of collective discipline is well, not looking to good to put it mildly

Great points. Another reason masking wasn't all that unusual was the prevalence of two-stroke engines in scooters (at least back when I lived there) which tend to put out a bit more pollution.