We just had a pandemic with 500k lives lost, which almost all experts agree could have largely been avoided with a strong response. Yet, millions of Americans still voted for the person most directly responsible.
So what happens to the country is quite clear. Morons get elected and run the country into even more crises until it gets so bad that the fundamental structures of social arrangements collapse. We've seen this happen in many civilizations; society seems incredibly stable, people can't imagine a world different from what they're used to and then one day some crucial piece of the very delicate threads that hold society together are broken, and then it rapidly unravels.
Also, all the information about what supposedly worked was distorted by politics too. For example, all of the countries like Taiwan which managed to keep it out relied heavily on imposing border restrictions early, but borders and travel restrictions were seen as evil, Trumpian things - a "prophetic" piece of fiction where President Trump responded to a pandemic by imposing increasingly futile border closures did the rounds on social media early on - so they were completely omitted from US media narratives about how those countries had succeed. Instead they focused on stuff like Covid testing, because of another equally bogus narrative that Trump had sabotaged that. (The US actually had a really ambitious testing program... right up until the tests arrived at labs and were defective. Apparently it turned out some career CDC employee hid the fact they were contaminated and let them roll out to labs, but this was missed by almost all the media coverage, probably because it had nothing to do with Trump.)
Fixed in place is rare unless something, usually external, overwhelms entrenched interests.