As of Monday, California, the country’s most populous state, with nearly 40 million residents, had just 692 fatalities in total, with 23,679 total confirmed coronavirus cases, according to the Los Angeles Times.

And while hospitals across the country scramble to secure enough basic life-saving equipment, California, Oregon and Washington – the three west coast states – are in a position to share, recently shipping 1,000 ventilators to overwhelmed hospitals in New York City and along the eastern seaboard.

The situation in the region improved to the point that on Monday governors of all three states announced a joint framework to reopen their economies together, once the virus is under control.

Emphasising the west coast’s unified front, California Governor Gavin Newsom said his state, Washington, and Oregon would respond economically “not just within our states, but more broadly as a region”.

To be sure, it’s hard to compare states’ responses to the outbreak. Each faced different circumstances with different population densities and all were effectively left to fend for themselves by a lack of federal guidance.

US outbreak ‘nearing peak’, while Italy’s infection curve flattens

Even so, California’s latest numbers show that the state has been successful in “flattening the curve”, with state officials saying they should have enough hospital beds to ride out the peak of the pandemic even in hardest-hit Los Angeles County, where 300 people have died.

In northern California’s Bay Area, including San Francisco, Oakland and Silicon Valley, stay-at-home orders were the earliest in the nation.

Now, hospital officials no longer worry about shortage of beds or even personal protective equipment (PPE), with large stockpiles gathered by local and state governments, and large donations from private companies and citizens.

California’s response has had its serious issues. While every state struggled to test outside of a relatively small group, mostly symptomatic patients, New York has far outpaced California, where massive backlogs and a slow roll-out of effective tests has obscured its numbers of infected and distorted its models.

According to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus website, as of Monday, New York, with about half California’s population, had more than twice as many tested: 461,601, compared with California’s 190,328.

Even so, the west coast’s responses to the virus were early and dramatic, and the swift actions have undoubtedly saved lives.

Washington state took the first steps recognising the coronavirus’s potential as a pandemic. It confirmed the nation’s first coronavirus case on January 21, and by February 29, identified the nation’s first Covid-19 death, along with acknowledging the nation’s first outbreak, among dozens of staff and residents in a suburban Seattle nursing home.

Governor Jay Inslee on the same day declared a state of emergency, the first in the nation, and began asking people to social distance.

Despite being the earliest US epicentre of the outbreak, the state, according to Johns Hopkins on Monday, had just 9,877 confirmed cases, and 506 deaths.

Sandwiched between California and Washington, Oregon followed their lead, with Governor Kate Brown declaring a state of emergency on March 8, after her state’s cases doubled from seven to a still-low 14 overnight. Oregon now has 1,584 confirmed cases, and 53 deaths.

The Bay Area was the first area in the nation to impose stay at home directives, with six counties including San Francisco announcing “shelter in place” orders on March 16.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti issued a “stay at home” order for his city – home to nearly 4 million people – just three days later, followed later that day by Newsom, who issued a statewide stay-at-home order.

Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, Dr Alexei Wagner, assistant director of adult emergency medicine at Stanford University’s school of medicine, said: “If you look at last week compared to this week, the California numbers are much flatter, the peaks are lower.

“And I think there is a sense that the work that we've done for social distancing, social isolation is definitely starting to flatten the curve.”

Even without its early actions, the west coast is uniquely positioned to tackle this pandemic. California boasts the largest economy in the US by far: its taxpayers account for 15 per cent of individual payments to the US Treasury. If it were its own country, California would have the fifth-largest economy in the world, larger than that of Britain.

California is also home to more billionaires than any other state; it and Washington are headquarters to many tech and biomedical companies whose support in fighting the virus has been invaluable.

The west coast has close trade relationships with Asia, especially China, which, for example, allowed Governor Newsom to quickly establish a pipeline directly from Chinese manufacturers to hospitals for surgical masks and other PPE.

California especially is also more politically unified – profoundly Democratic – than many other states, helping it move fast and decisively with less political infighting in the time of crisis.

For his part, in discussing California’s response to the coronavirus, Newsom now peppers his daily briefings with the phrase “nation-state” – evidently a bid to hold up his state as a counterexample to what many describe as the federal government’s botched handling of Covid-19.

Emphasising the west coast’s unified response to the pandemic, on Monday Newsom announced a joint statement by California, Washington, and Oregon setting out a shared framework for reopening the economy “not just within our states, but more broadly as a region”.

Discussing on Monday the joint moves he and his west coast counterparts will be planning, Newsom said, “I just want to acknowledge and thank … Governor Brown, and Governor Inslee for their ongoing partnership, their incredible support, and the collaborative spirit that … goes well beyond just this moment.”

He added: “We have had the deep collaborative spirit advanced now in states large and small across the United States – but none stronger than the relationships we have formed with Washington state and the state of Oregon.”