Even China ended up resorting to dressing medical staff in plastic bags and reusing single-use masks, from what I can tell - there are pictures out there and everything - and they had the advantage of being able to redirect a huge chunk of the world's supply of PPE into tackling an outbreak concentrated in a single city. The really substantial difference in China is that the press there isn't allowed to run article after article accusing the national government of trying to kill their medical staff, not that they're more competent. (Also, the official Chinese government line is that infections of medical staff happened due to exposure outside the workplace, and there's likely some truth to that from what other countries have seen.)
