South Korea has of course in place an excellent system because they could reasonably expect a SARS like illness, Western Europe and North America were prepared for a flu like illness, because that's what usually happens here. Germany was fortunate to have as part of their business as usual economy a large testing base they could call on that the UK and other countries didn't have. Testing is definitely the key to getting the virus under control, and having mass testing early on would've definitely been beneficial, but it's not the single reason the UK and US have been hit hard. You can only prepare for things that have a reasonable chance of actually happening, otherwise we'd be spending our entire government budget building rockets with nuclear bombs attached to fire at an asteroid which might never hit, amongst every other potential disaster that could happen. There's a lot of people benefiting from hindsight in their criticism, China only reported 4 thousand deaths in Wuhan and the WHO were saying the virus wasn't transmitted human to human in January, yet people expected us to lock down the country at the first sign of a case, and the fact we didn't is now Boris Johnson and Trumps fault.
*Sigh* Go and read the pandemic playbook that was created under the Obama administration. And they specifically a response to novel coronaviruses in the past as it was highlighted to be a major threat. It specifically lists in there Coronaviruses as a threat and how to deal with it. I also posted an article on the previous page from The Guardian that states that the US and the UK were number #1 and number #2 in the world for their ability to deal with any pandemic. That was before both the US and the UK government fumbled around like buffoons trying to play catch with a stick of butter and failing miserably.
The funding was not stopped!!!!!
Oh come on man, now you're just clutching at straws and failing miserably! Is that the best you've got? I write an entire post proving you're wrong and about the pandemic response and you can't even respond to that?!