Such a political take. The US did a lot right.

We absolutely had no effective backup plan, but also weren't completely honest about relying so heavily on vaccines.

(Now again vaccines are great, so that's not the worst plan, but what I'm getting it was it wasn't really the plan at all. We were screwing up by the measure of our own goals rather than intentionally waiting for the big bailout.)

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Also East Asia is mopping the floor. There's truly very little good to say about EU let alone US in comparison.

Probably not. The infection and death rates were plummeting even before general availability of the vaccine. States that locked down super hard, and states that barely locked down at all, have essentially the same infection/death rates as well.

The US is a big country, with a lot of people. However, the average health of an individual in the US is far better than the East Asia area, and much of the world. That's before we even consider the vast young population in the US which mostly are asymptomatic infectees...

The number of people who have been infected already and cannot become infected again with the same variant is likely massive in the US, making it quite possible the US would have weathered even the latest variants due to a lack of infectible people (ie. "herd immunity").

We have tiered lockdowns all over the place, rent protections, paycheck protections, massively improved digital services from Google, Zoom, etc. Just the digital services alone have enabled home schooling and home working for a good chunk of the world.

I wouldn’t call this nothing.