Only time will tell, but fairly aggressive measures are already being taken in California and Washington where the cases are only in the hundreds, and many other states are following close behind when they have few to no cases. One thing even many Americans don’t properly appreciate is the degree to which most things are actually run at the state and local level. So far the federal dysfunction has not stopped the states and cities from moving. If that stays the case, the US may be okay.
One other factor in the US favor, it’s extremely low population density compared to the rest of the world. The US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all similarly low density and in this specific case likely to benefit from that.
I'm not sure the average population density across the entire country is that relevant - it doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of population.
The US is actually rather an urban country - 82% live in urban areas which is more than Italy (75%):
You pretty much can't compare the definition of "city" or "urban area" in different countries, so that tells you nothing.
I mean, Berlin has 3.7 million people in a city of 890 sq km. Melbourne has about 5 million people in a city of almost 10,000 km. They're incomparable, and so the urban population of Australia and Germany are incomparable. (You can play with the definitions as much as you like but you'll never be able to compare arbitrary Australian and German cities.)
This is actually due to the inclusion of suburbs and exurbs in the “urban” category for US, Canada & Australia.
Half of the US population lives in the suburbs (see above posters). What we would recognize as a real urban environment only accounts for less than a third of the US population (98M people).
Maybe its my UK bias - the distinction between urban and suburban doesn't seem to feature a lot in statistics here - things are often just usually "urban" (including suburbs) or "rural".
I did see a figure of about 55% of everyone in England and Wales living in suburbs - but I suspect our suburbs look pretty dense to someone from Houston or indeed Achiltibuie!
Washington has just, for example, banned all events with over 250 people in them for the three most affected counties.
Cities and counties in CA had been doing the same with different thresholds. Which meant an NBA game was going to be played without fans (since then, the NBA season has been suspended, which is a pretty significant measure in and of itself).
Many schools have been closing in the Seattle area, and just today the Seattle school district, and many outlying school districts closed for at least two weeks. That's a lot of school closures.
Many companies are having employees work from home wherever possible. The amount of traffic in Seattle during rush-hour is an astronomical change. There's very light traffic during rush hour in places that used to be wall-to-wall vehicles.
As someone living in the Seattle area, it feels like life has substantially changed.
Bay Area, I'm wfh, my wife is wfh, all our family and friends that work for major tech companies are wfh, 85-N had no traffic at 9:30 AM this morning, we pulled our kid out of gymnastics class 2 weeks ago, we haven't been going to museums (one of which is closed, because of coronavirus), and his day care (which nominally has 12 students) was down to 7 last Friday and now 3 of those are out because of hand-foot-mouth disease. Berkeley, Stanford, and Santa Clara University have all gone remote-only and sent the students home. Stores are completely out of rice, beans, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, etc, and a bunch of people are wearing masks. I figure it's just a matter of time before we're on complete lock-down.
I have a few friends that teach at K-12 schools in California and they've all been told to figure out what platform they want to use to do teach remotely. Our local school district sent out an email to parents outlining an online teaching plan.
I don't know if they're all just being exceptionally prepared or if there's plans for a more widespread school shutdown here.
School districts are closing down, for one. For example, my hometown's school district (Elk Grove Unified School District) shut down all campuses this week (but are apparently allowing athletic and academic team activities - i.e. sports - tomorrow): http://www.egusd.net/covid-19/
Allow me to rephrase then: while the overall population density of the US is low, we have some pretty large dense areas, including Southern California and the northeast megalopolis
Compared to similar areas elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, these areas are not dense at all. Wuhan, which you surely hadn't heard of before this crisis, is ~denser than~ nearly as dense as New York City, for example.
One other factor in the US favor, it’s extremely low population density compared to the rest of the world. The US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all similarly low density and in this specific case likely to benefit from that.