I think the basic problem with the American COVID-19 response is that US elites haven't faced a real crisis for so long that they don't have the institutional knowledge to know how to respond to a national-level crisis that can't be treated as a political problem.
Since WWII, the crises faced by the US have been small enough that American elites have been able to politically neutralize them with a combination of half-measures and concerted efforts to mold public opinion to shift blame onto disfavored groups, such as 'liberals,' urbanites, non-Christians, and/or non-Americans. Until COVID-19, it's seldom been politically necessary for America's elites to actually do something about America's crises as opposed to making sure that someone else takes the blame for them.
COVID-19 is different. It is a global-scale disaster that requires a competent national response and can't be politically neutralized because viruses aren't political actors. American elites, however, have no experience with this kind of crisis and have been unable to respond to it as anything but a political problem and, worse, as a source for graft. The results have been an abject failure in terms of lives lost, health lost, and economic damage.
(This is not a problem unique to the US. I have seen some comparative politics research that found a strong co-relation between poor national-level COVID-19 responses and the depth of internal political divisions. I speculate that highly divided societies make blame shifting by elites a favorable strategy for crisis response and erode the ability of elites to respond to real crises.)