If I can offer a piece of advice in that direction, it is to remember that the US is in fact a union of 50 states, and those states actually have a fair amount of power. The federal government, as powerful as it appears to be, really does lack authority in many areas. While they could absolutely have done a 1000% better job leading the response to the coronavirus, it was always going to fall mostly on the states to do the actual heavy lifting. It's the nature of our political system.
Speaking from the Netherlands, it seems clear that about 40% of Americans lost their marbles in this grand collective paranoid fantasy starting around Nixon, growing through Reagan, and then really taking off around the end of the W. Bush administration.
They started to believe these terrible and terribly false things about their fellow citizens, about science, about pretty well everything.
And they purchase hundreds of millions of weapons.
> And yet America managed two world wars just fine.
Sure, defense is one of those things that is definitely the purview of the federal government.
But for many things that the feds haven't managed to figure out how to control yet, the tenth amendment is very much in play. For pandemic response this is definitely true. It was true in 1918, remains true today. The states are in charge.
Given recent history (in particular, as it relates to your 40%), I expect that the states may actually start asserting more authority, instead of continuing to cede it bit-by-bit to the federal government. Which perhaps does lead to your final comment ;-).
If I can offer a piece of advice in that direction, it is to remember that the US is in fact a union of 50 states, and those states actually have a fair amount of power. The federal government, as powerful as it appears to be, really does lack authority in many areas. While they could absolutely have done a 1000% better job leading the response to the coronavirus, it was always going to fall mostly on the states to do the actual heavy lifting. It's the nature of our political system.