Lowest number of total deaths. It seems like I'm wrong though as Germany's total deaths are lower than Belgium, so they are doing better than everyone else.
I've talked about this before, but to me success is managing the spread within the community. The blue print is the one SK have provided, which is to test and trace. To successfully do that you need your testing capacity to be big enough to manage it within your country.
The lockdown isn't there to shut you up inside until there is a vaccine, and opening up restrictions doesn't mean we want people to get it to "build herd immunity. You just want to buy enough time so that you can increase your capacity to successfully test and trace and couple it with a few of the more effective restrictions (ban on large gatherings, restrict travel etc).
The other thing a lockdown does is, it provides you with quite useful data on the "real" number of people who have it. When the growth of cases is exponential, the number of people you diagnose (which is constant) is limited by the number of people you can test - thus the models you're using to determine community spread are quite wild (because the growth of cases is constantly outstripping your testing capacity). When you flatten the curve (i.e. the new number of new diagnosed cases is constant) you have a much better idea of the "real" number of cases.
That's my thinking behind it anyways, I could be talking shit.
Yeah, the bolded in combination with the fact that Germany has over 7 times the population of Belgium. There's loads of factors why things are looking 'good' over there.
Like you said, the testing. From what I've read the Germans were the first in Europe to test so extensively, simply because they had the expertise to quickly develop tests (they were extra prepared since some incident with rotten vegetables brought into supermarkets caused a minor health crisis a couple of years back, killing dozens of people).
Other countries would've liked or would like to do similar testing but they haven't got the infrastructure in place to develop and implement the testing in a similar way while panic was breaking out. Germans were able to test a ridiculous amount from the beginning compared to other countries, even younger people with mild symptoms were tested extensively and they traced back every contact moment as far as they could for everyone.
The average age of infected patients was around 45 years vs 65+ years in countries like Italy and France. On top of that they have by far the most ICU beds with 30/100.000 inhabitants, whereas most other countries have less than 10/100.000 which obviously saves a lot of mass panick and creates calmness. They're also still expanding the ICU capacity.
I would also say that having rational politcal leadership from top to lower level surely must be a positive factor. They definitely have competent people in place at the most important positions, which is not exactly a given elsewhere.
It's a big country in terms of surface so maybe there are also quite a few areas that are not densely populated which could help.
Of course there's always a big question mark because I guess you can't 100% ensure there won't be some dramatic surge over the next months due to something unforseen.