I think it was heavily dependent on the administration.
To my knowledge, recent past administration quite literally made a step by step "playbook on how to manage a pandemic" and the current administration quite literally completely ignored it, or something close to this.
The unit was disbanded. Agree or disagree why it was disbanded, nothing was created to replace it. This is one of many examples of how things were/are worse than they needed to be.
I have a hard time coming up with examples of countries that handled the pandemic very well, so I would think that it's less dependent on the administration than it might appear.
I think like, Vietnam and South Korea did exceptionally well?
Think Vietnam eventually started getting hit though because of other countries lack of handling things, tourism, and the general fact that they're not by any means a rich country. So, they did surprisingly well given what they had, but eventually got dragged down by the rest of the bullshitters.
This is all off the top of my head in remembering things though, may be incorrect.
To the best of my knowledge Belorussia did absolutely nothing and didn't have a massive death wave.
And before you tell me it's a dictatorship so they have hidden the true numbers, I'm pretty sure if it had been the case it would have been at the forefront of the protests last year.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I do think COVID fear has been massively overblown.
Running an authoritarian regime in a former Soviet satellite is a decent way to ensure you don't get too many international travelers. That would be my guess for why they might have dodged the brunt of the pandemic.
My belief in disaster preparedness from the powers that be was severely shaken by the early to mid term response to covid in the US.
I genuinely thought we’d handle a large scale disaster that had been prepared for forever much, much better than we did.