The mainstream media is very much part of the problem. For example, both the idea that the US could've avoided a substantial proportion of those pandemic-related deaths and people's beliefs about how it could've done so are the result of systematic, partisan misinformation by trusted publications like the New York Times about how the US compares to other countries, what those other countries have been doing, how well it works, the actual evidence for stuff like vaccines and masks, and so on. (One thing that stood out to me lately is that their readers evidently think Europe did much better, from the comments section - and it's obvious why, because pretty much the only comparisons with Europe the NYT publishes are ones that make the US look bad, and if they flip the other way it stops publishing them.)
Some of this unfortunately leaked into the narrative here in the UK, like the stupid idea that the reason we were failing was because our incompetent government couldn't achieve South Korean levels of mass testing - something which the media kept pushing even after their actual level of Covid testing fell massively behind the US and UK, and even after it became clear that their test and trace wasn't nearly as effective at controlling Covid as the media spin claimed.