The US has a truly terrible tendency to start speeches about itself with "The US is the greatest country on earth when it comes to X ..." whatever X may be.
To the point that I suspect even the people uttering it truly believe what they're peddling.
If there's a country that has understood at a gut level that good marketing trumps honesty every time, it's the US.
Unfortunately, good marketing and truth are very rarely compatible [1].
So it could have deviated on mask guidance, too.
This issue was due to the ineptness and hubris of the current administration, which defunded relevant initiatives, ignored the warnings, and refused to learn lessons from other nations' experience with the virus.
Our medical system is fully capable of managing this with the proper preparation and supportive social policy. In fact, there is not a medical system in the world that could manage a pandemic of this scale without those things.
I mean, what evidence is there that having a dedicated pandemic team would have helped? This is the same government you just said was incompetent, so why would this have helped? The botched initial testing came from the CDC and FDA, so how did the admin make that happen? And the CDC would have been the same group that had a dedicated pandemic team. You might be able to point at some Trump appointee and say that person was directly responsible for the testing disaster, but I think that's unlikely. What if it turns out an Obama appointee caused the problem? I certainly wouldn't blame Obama for that.
Also, the federal government is not supposed to be this dictator that controls everything in the US. Each state, each county is better equipped to figure out how to handle the crisis. The feds should be helping with logistics and guidelines, but what else? A nationwide lock down might not be good for the entire country. For example, a very rural state, might not really need a lock down. Or it might need a more measured lock down of a few very urban city centers. And would it even be legal for the federal government to order a lock down?
As for leadership at the federal level, the coronavirus task force was created at the end of January. Should it have been created earlier? Maybe if the WHO and the CCP weren't lying their asses off about the disease it would have been. The only thing that allowed Taiwan to handle this better was that they knew the CCP would be lying, so when they heard about a new disease in December, they immediately went into disease protocol mode.
Look, do I think the current US admin is handling this perfectly, no. But they are not doing this horrible job that many people seem to want them to be doing. Maybe if all you ever see is the negative articles you would believe that, but I would urge you to dig deeper. You don't even need to go to some fringe websites to see people saying the admin is doing a good job. And I don't mean looking at Fox News, I mean people on MSNBC and other left leaning networks are not all completely negative.
Relatively good administration my ass, that bar is a chalk line on the ground.