It is an honest question. In your opinion, who should have done what when?
Well, it's easy to play armchair warrior, and hindsight is 20/20. Just the fact that we are HAVING this discussion is proof that something / many things went horribly wrong.
SARS-CoV-1 broke out in China in 2003. We have had 17 years to prepare for the next version - particularly since China doesn't seem to want to do anything about people dealing in wild animal meat. There were actually several promising treatments for SARS that were in development... but the private companies who were working on them stopped development because they couldn't be guaranteed that someone would want to buy them after the SARS pandemic fizzled out. I'm not going to comment about whether the government should have funded development of a SARS vaccine, because I don't know what other priorities were out there. However it was a missed opportunity.
If you look at the timeline for this outbreak, we have had months to prepare. When I say "we" I don't mean "you and I" because it isn't our job to track disease and create public health policy. However it was public knowledge that a novel coronavirus was breaking out in China as early as December, 2019. By January 30, the World Health Organization declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. By February 11, they were aware that the virus belonged to the same sub-genus as SARS-CoV-1, and even named it SARS-CoV-2, though no one in government (or the media) told people it was for all intents and purposes the SARS virus, just in a more virulent form. Even now people are calling it "CoViD-19" for "CoronaVirus Disease 2019" instead of what it REALLY is - SARS2.
If I believe what I read online, the textbook health policy approach when dealing with a virus like SARS-CoV-2 in early days is to (1) isolate (2) test (3) treat (4) trace. You track everyone who is incoming from the hot zone, you isolate them, you test them to see if any are positive, you treat them, and you trace anyone they might have been in contact with. So let's start with the first question: "How was someone visiting family in Wuhan, China allowed to return home to the US, and then go visit a nursing home in Kirkland, WA?" That decision cost 35 people their lives, and jumped-started the spread of the virus here in the country. I don't have the exact figures, but for the first couple of weeks there was no community spread of the virus here in the US - literally every single case was coming in from outside of the country. People were not being stopped at the borders and isolated. So that is public policy failure #1
Next, there is the whole question of testing. How is it possible that we don't have enough SARS-CoV-2 tests... and that we actually have to beg TURKEY for 500,000 tests because we can't seem to produce enough? You can read my linked article above to see what a complete and utter train wreck our domestic testing policy has been, but the outcome is that we don't have the slightest clue how many domestic cases might exist, and we have been unable even to allow people with symptoms to get tested so they themselves know to what extent they need to self-isolate, or how much at risk their loved ones might be. In fact tonight I heard that they aren't even testing for SARS-CoV-2 "if the results of the test won't impact your treatment plan". In other words, if you read the fine print on all of these "active cases" charts, you will see that active cases include "assumed SARS-CoV-2 cases" because they can't even test people dying in ICU's to definitively know what they're dying from. So that is public policy failure #2.
Because they have been unable to isolate or test... the virus is now prevalent in our society - albeit at a low level. Active cases are now guestimated at 26,700, but even if the TRUE number of active cases is 10x as high (at 267,000) that still means the virus is active in fewer than 0.1% of our population. But because the government has completely lost control of the "isolate and test" steps, the only alternative left is to treat the ENTIRE POPULATION even if you know that 99.9% of the people don't need to be treated. Hence the "shelter in place" for EVERYONE, the critical shortage of certain products and medical supplies - because you are telling every single person in this country to go out and stock up for three weeks of "shelter in place" when you know that 99.9% don't really need to do so. But because you can't identify and isolate the active cases, you have to go with the sledgehammer approach.
The good news is that we DO know a lot about this virus because of its close similarity to SARS-CoV-1, and all the prior work that was done on SARS. We have a jump start not only on treatment protocols, but also on development of a vaccine. And the truth is that the virus does not respond well to warm weather or high humidity, so like seasonal flu we can hope for an early summer that, though it won't cure the virus, will slow it down significantly.
In a nutshell it was too little, too late. And now the cost of treating 99.9% of people who don't need it is going to crush the economy and cause horrific hardship for many people. But it may be the only thing we can do... because we screwed everything else up and it is our last defence.
