By leaving it up to the states, we’re creating a distributed system where there can be failure without bringing down the whole country.
Why not succeed as a country? Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan are doing much better than the US with their country-wide responses:
The point is to reduce the infection rate so that the total number of hospitalizations (Covid19 or otherwise) does not exceed the healthcare system's capacity. I doubt your uncited claim here is comparing apples to apples.
A little more speculative is my suspicion that a capitalist society storing its surplus in private hands may be correlated with a society that is unprepared for a crisis of this magnitude. The first time the President came on the radio to talk about the crisis, his tacit message was: We are hopelessly unprepared for this.
More to the point of the article, I find Fauci's appreciation of non-sickness issues to be refreshing and helpful. Most doctors are so focused on the disease itself that they don't seem to take 'collateral damage' from containment into account.