Personally I like to give countries the benefit of the doubt. As difficult as it sounds to quarantine and stop the spread of a virus in a country with 1+ billion people and multiple 10M+ cities, China is one of the few countries that could actually pull it off.
At the end of the day, the option you pick probably depends on whether or not you trust the numbers provided :)
The formula is a combination of: 40% - new cases / total cases (indicator of how much things are blowing up) 40% - absolute number of new cases (indicator for whether things are slowing down or not) 20% - recovered cases / total cases (indicator for recovery progress, although not all countries seem to post their recovery data)
The formula itself is somewhat arbitrary, but I felt it was a decently good metric that summarized the situation in every country. I'm open to suggestions on how to improve it as well!