In March 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. Given the novelty of the virus, and hence, lack of official guidance on effective containment strategies, individual countries opted for different containment approaches ranging from herd immunity to strict lockdown. The opposing strategies followed by the United Kingdom and its former colony, Malaysia, stand exemplary for this. Real-time polymerase chain reaction was implemented for testing in both counties. Malaysia acted with strict quarantining rules and infection surveillance. The United Kingdom followed an initially lenient, herd-immunity approach with strict lockdown only enforced weeks later. Although based on the same health-care structure historically, Malaysia developed a more unified health system compared with the United Kingdom. We suggest that this more centralized structure could be one possible explanation for why Malaysia was able to react in a more timely and efficient manner, despite its closer geographic proximity to China. We further explore how the differences in testing and quarantining strategy, as well as political situation and societal compliance could account for the discrepancy in the United Kingdom's versus Malaysia's relative success of COVID-19 containment.