The US hasn't been behind. On the contrary, the epidemic has not his the US as hard as it has most of the rest of the industrialized world, and that was in large part due to the ban on travel from China. This is why it was necessary to extend the travel ban to most European countries. As the President pointed out:
"Our team is the best anywhere in the world. At the very start of the outbreak, we instituted sweeping travel restrictions on China and put in place the first federally mandated quarantine in over 50 years. We declared a public health emergency and issued the highest level of travel warning on other countries as the virus spread its horrible infection.
And taking early intense action, we have seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States than are now present in Europe.
The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots. As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe."