The case rate per million in Hubei went as high as 1145 per million people. No other Chinese province exceeded 22 per million people. This degree of containment was a huge success for the Chinese authorities. In my opinion, it was due to an unprecedented travel ban introduced on January 22nd for the city of Wuhan. This was expanded next day to cover 35 million people in Wuhan and the surrounding cities. US experts interviewed at the time were skeptical that the travel ban would work, but in hindsight it seems to have been a big success.
Also important for containment was the vigorous public health response in other Chinese provinces. The travel ban ensured that other regions were not overwhelmed by infected people coming out of Hubei.
Reducing the load on the health care system seems to have had a big impact on the death rate. The death rate was 4.5% for Hubei province but only 0.9% for the rest of China.
The US is currently doing a much less effective job of containing the virus than the Chinese did. After Hubei, Zhejiang was the worst affected Chinese province with 21 infections per million people. Several US states are now above that level.
However, I think there is still time to avoid severe, widespread infection by imposing travel restrictions on the worst affected states. Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, the New York City Metro Area, Louisiana, Colorado and Massachusetts are the worst affected areas. Shutting down passenger air and rail travel from those regions could prevent them from sending large numbers of infections to the rest of the US.
NY Times January story on Wuhan travel ban
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