There are several big advantages that Americans have over other nations.
1) Extremely good personal hygiene and public sanitation. During WWII, the US government launched a never ending program to teach Americans hygiene, sanitation, and decontamination.
2) Standoffishness. When the threat of epidemics hit, Americans quickly forgo mass gatherings like sports events, which are often officially banned early on. They also increase their personal comfort zone distance from others, and definitely avoid being around those who are sick.
3) Health authority obedience. Only a small, if vocal, minority oppose vaccination and other official remedies if offered. Those who are suspicious usually “button up” to try to preserve their health in isolation, which itself is effective.
4) About 10% of the US population has some degree of general immunity to epidemic pathogens, which goes back to their European ancestry and the black plague of the 14th Century. This also renders them partially or fully immune to HIV, influenza, the common cold, etc. The pool of those who are partially immune, who would catch the disease but get better, provides a potentially huge amount of available antibodies for everyone else.
“who would catch the disease but get better”
They could be barely sick with the disease but still act as reservoirs of infections to weaker folks until their better antibodies boot up. These silent “typhoid marys” are what may be a threat to populations that have no qualms with behaviors where sharing body fluids is a common as breathing. The Lib progressives screamed about aids and discrimination....how would they ever handle a super ebola plague that forced the surviving populations into moral behaviors that would rival the apostles themselves?
We have the ten commandments for a reason and even if one discounts the spiritual(which I don’t!)...nature herself can apply a most brutal scourge upon froward humanity!
I have to wonder if some of our behavior that protects us from infection is a cultural legacy from being survivors of some really bad pandemics in the past.
We won’t eat dead things unless we know they were killed while healthy. Africans eat dead animals they find in the forest.
There are other major behavior differences that would make a disease like Ebola have a difficult time establishing itself here the way it has in Africa.