The failures are fractal, hence I’ll collect different takes from different perspectives.

The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.

the pandemic outed 100Ms as dumb fucks, not really news, but still depressing.

the United States underperformed across the board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit the virus’s spread. Twitter amplified Trump’s misleading messages, which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to spend more time scouring for information on Twitter. Even seasoned health experts underestimated these compounded risks.

Also, this analysis is far too kind on the establishment: so many institutional failures and inertia at the CDC and FDA that have nothing to do with this narrative.
The following piece argued that all the pandemic planning was a waste of time.

The failure of the United States government to respond to the coronavirus was not a failure of foresight. It was a failure to create a coherent strategy and to provide clear lines of authority to implement it. To prepare for the next pandemic, we need to end our current proliferation of planning mandates and overlapping agency authorities (such as that of the Assistant Secretary for Response and Preparedness), strengthen the pandemic response ability of one agency (preferably the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and reform our current National Emergency Act to allow clear delegation of emergency power. Only by examining our current failures and rectifying them, most importantly, by combining authority, responsibility, and accountability in the right hands, can we make sure that our next Pandemic Preparedness Act is not an embarrassment to its name.

We also lost a lot of process knowledge to be able to pivot quickly:

US factories are as productive as ever but they’ve lost the process knowledge needed to retool quickly in a crisis.

COVID-19 crisis reveals paralytic nature of America’s regulatory order:

We need an immediate intervention to break America free from its bureaucratic addiction.

States can’t even redirect 0.3% of their budget:

States and local public health officials have warned for months that they would need more than $8B in additional funding to stand up the infrastructure needed to administer vaccines. Total state and local spending is about $3.7 trillion, $2.3 trillion from the states alone. $8B is how much of that? Our states cannot come up with 0.3% of their budgets to meet the greatest emergency in our lifetimes?

Meanwhile, alcohol producer can’t make sanitizer:

Worse yet, the FDA reversed course, announcing additional restrictions that effectively prevent any sales, even though ethanol companies had already produced and shipped millions of liters of high-grade alcohol for hand sanitizer.

here’s how things went with contact tracing:

But the effort was frustrated as the CDC’s decades-old notification system delivered information collected at the airports that was riddled with duplicative records, bad phone numbers and incomplete addresses. For weeks, officials tried to track passengers using lists sent by the CDC, scouring information about each flight in separate spreadsheets. “It was insane”

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