"From the helicopter" there is now a more general claim (e.g. in the following McKinsey slide) that Western countries are trying to emulate China and/or South Korea's response:
The devil might be in the details, of course. Getting to the details might be too involved/broad in a question like this, not specific to a pair of countries. There's for example a China-US comparison in a recent BI article, too long to quote here in its entirety, of course. But some things that were probably not done in the West was a complete shutdown of travel, e.g.
"These draconian measures seem to have worked to bring down the cases in a very short period of time in China," Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Business Insider. "Although there is a cost to the economy, to society, not to mention also the second-order problems, like access to health care for people without the coronavirus. The question is whether the United States is willing to pay such a high price." [...] Huang says he cannot imagine an America where many of these measures are implemented. [...]
During the height of the outbreak, trains didn't stop at the disease's epicenter, Wuhan. [...] "Cutting off transportation was considered on the top three measures to contain the spread of the virus," Huang told Business Insider. "But it would hard to imagine the complete shutdown of an American city due to government order."
And regarding tracking of people's movement
"It would be a big change right for the US people to get accustomed to," said Huang, "if the government wants to use this high tech means, like using the cell phones to monitor the movement of the people."
Huang added that even though there is little technological barrier to doing this, this kind of behavior is considered a form of digital authoritarianism, that involves uses privacy issues. Huang would be hard-pressed to imagine the US government using this approach to containing the spread of the coronavirus.
China also apparently co-opted every ("private") security guard in the effort to keep people in their homes:
"In America, you have to stay at home, but there's no police," said Huang. "There's no one actively enforcing that rule, but in China, you have what are basically security guards on patrol of every residence to make sure they don't violate the government containment measures. That's a kind of approach I think can't be copied here in the United States."
Likewise for suspending "non-essential" medical access:
In China, elective surgeries and other non-critical doctors visits were delayed, and many medical services were moved online. [...] But the move hasn't been without negative consequences. One man with kidney disease in China jumped to his death, Human Rights Watch reported. He couldn't get dialysis during the outbreak. Another boy with cerebral palsy died after being left alone for six days while his father was quarantined in China.
A similar opinion was voiced in a Time interview:
“No other nation (western or otherwise) can or should seek to replicate China’s actions,” Thomas Bollyky, the director of the Global Health Program at the Washington D.C.-based Council on Foreign Relations, tells TIME via email. “The disregard for civil liberties and human rights that the government has demonstrated in its quarantine and censorship activities are inseparable from the policies and actions of the government that contributed to the outbreak in the first place.”
Other experts quoted earlier in a Science (news) piece were also skeptical that the full extent of China's measures could be copied in the West:
The question now is whether the world can take lessons from China’s apparent success—and whether the massive lockdowns and electronic surveillance measures imposed by an authoritarian government would work in other countries. [...]
“This report poses difficult questions for all countries currently considering their response to COVID-19,” says Steven Riley, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London. “The joint mission was highly productive and gave a unique insight into China’s efforts to stem the virus from spread within mainland China and globally,” adds Lawrence Gostin, a global health law scholar at Georgetown University. But Gostin warns against applying the model elsewhere. “I think there are very good reasons for countries to hesitate using these kinds of extreme measures.”
There’s also uncertainty about what the virus, dubbed SARS-CoV-2, will do in China after the country inevitably lifts some of its strictest control measures and restarts its economy. COVID-19 cases may well increase again.
More recent cases from Hong Kong indicate that that fear of re-emergence may well be have been justified. So Hong Kong is back into lock down after it was largely lifted at the beginning of March.
Similar expert opinion on restrictions timing:
Epidemiologists say China’s mammoth response had one glaring flaw: it started too late. In the initial weeks of the outbreak in December and January, Wuhan authorities were slow to report cases of the mysterious infection, which delayed measures to contain it, says Howard Markel, a public-health researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The delay of China to act is probably responsible for this world event,” says Markel.
A model simulation by Lai Shengjie and Andrew Tatem, emerging-disease researchers at the University of Southampton, UK, shows that if China had implemented its control measures a week earlier, it could have prevented 67% of all cases there. Implementing the measures 3 weeks earlier, from the beginning of January, would have cut the number of infections to 5% of the total. [...]
But between 16 and 30 January, a period that included the first 7 days of the lockdown, the number of people each infected individual gave the virus to dropped to 1.05, estimates Adam Kucharski, who models infectious-disease spread at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “That was amazing,” he says. [...]
“These extreme limitations on population movement have been quite successful,” says Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease scientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. [... However,] China is suppressing the virus, not eradicating it, says Osterholm. The world will need to wait until about eight weeks after China resumes to some form of normality to know what it did or didn’t accomplish with its population-movement limitations, he says.
There is probably a fierce debate going on in China about when to relax the lockdown measures, says Roy Anderson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London. He suggests there could be a second wave of new infections when they are lifted.
So whether it's possible to (fully) emulate China's response (in the West) depends not only on the political framework, but also to which experts the (Western) governments might be paying [most] attention to.
I realize this is a long answer already, but there was a recent interview with one of China's [own] CDC officials (whom seldom get interviewed in the West). Some interesting points from there:
Q: What mistakes are other countries making?
A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. [...]
Q: People who tested positive in Wuhan but only had mild disease were sent into isolation in large facilities and were not allowed to have visits from family. Is this something other countries should consider?
A: Infected people must be isolated. [...]
Q: Spread in China has dwindled to a crawl, and the new confirmed cases are mainly people entering the country, correct?
A: Yes. At the moment, we don’t have any local transmission, but the problem for China now is the imported cases. So many infected travelers are coming into China.
More recently (April 2) it has been reported by DW that Germany is considering a voluntary phone app similar to the (mandatory?) one[s] used in China:
The most famous health app was developed by the tech giant Alibaba in conjunction with the Chinese authorities. Other companies have also developed similar software, however. It was possible to work swiftly because the Chinese state already has access regarding citizens' movements and programmers did not have to worry about data protection laws. [...]
There are many who hope that Germany will soon be using such an app. The Health Ministry and researchers at the Robert Koch Institute are developing similar software. The idea is to introduce a non-compulsory app that will not be able to detect who met whom and where but will be able to identify if a phone user was in close contact with another infected user.
The app will only really be able to function if 60 percent of the population uses it. In Germany, it won't be as easy as in Asia to reach such a percentage.
Will Germans cooperate?
Half of the respondents to a recent poll said they would not oppose an app to help warn users who had come into contact with someone infected with COVID-19.
They don't link to the poll, but I guess in was a poll in Germany given that this was an article on DW.
There's now a BBC video discussing Chinese-inspired surveillance measures to combat the outbreak. This is of course somewhat subjective, but they only short-listed Singapore, Israel, Iran, Taiwan and Russia as being closest to China-style surveillance measures used to combat the epidemic, like using CCTV cameras and phone tracking.
