It's a fairly typical place for a western country to be at this stage of the pandemic. Because of the way the disease spread via inter-country travel from, mostly, Italy and surrounding countries, the developed western world was hit first - and because people have to be tested in order for their deaths to be recorded as Covid-19 related, only countries with a reasonably well-developed healthcare system and economy actually report meaningful death counts. (The US in particular had really widespread testing compared to almost everyone else during the whole time period where it had a widespread Covid-19 outbreak - though the mainstream media gave the opposite impression for partisan political reasons.)
The reporting on the CDC's failures certainly was a stitchup on behalf of the Democrats. For example, the US had a really aggressive rollout of Covid-19 testing compared to Europe and other places which would've left it much better equipped to spot community spread early on when the number of cases was still small - right up until the point the reagents turned up at labs and didn't work, and ages was wasted working out why. Turns out some nominally well-qualified, non-partisan CDC official had covered up the fact the tests were contaminated and let them roll out to labs anyway. You wouldn't know this from the media reporting which inverted the blame, telling their readers it was Trump and his administration which decided not to have widespread Covid testing, that any screw-ups were due to his political appointees, and literally had people begging in the NYT comments section for career CDC staff to take over the running of the whole pandemic response because at least they were competent, unlike Trump and co.
'McGowan reached his breaking point when Redfield asked him to stop the deportation of a dog, according to people who worked closely with him.
In late June, a Peace Corps volunteer evacuated from West Africa was told that the rabies vaccine of her dog, a terrier mix named Socrates, was not valid. Rabies vaccines are marked with pink dye, and a photo of Socrates’ vaccination showed a clear liquid, a CDC email said. Border authorities said Socrates had to be sent back to Africa, revaccinated and quarantined there for 28 days before returning. The Peace Corps volunteer sparked a #SaveSocrates outcry on social media.
CDC experts told McGowan that the last foreign dog with rabies that slipped through had cost more than $500,000 in public health charges, including shots for 44 people who had been near the animal, an email shows. Making an exception threatened to render the policy unenforceable for the 500 animals that are deported every year.
At a time when the pandemic had killed nearly 130,000 Americans, McGowan spent an hour and a half on the phone with the HHS general counsel and other senior officials to figure out how to make an exception for a dog. All the while, he told colleagues, his mind kept returning to the fact that the same administration was using the CDC’s quarantine power to deport thousands of children at the border with Mexico.
Later that day, Brian Harrison, the HHS chief of staff and a former labradoodle breeder, announced the liberation of Socrates. Secretary Azar tweeted out the news with the hashtag #SaveSocrates.
Privately, McGowan fumed.
“He was sad, downtrodden and defeated,” a colleague said. “This was really the final straw for him: How we are going to let dogs in, but basically we’re going to require children to be carted off and out of the country? And all in the name of public health.”
McGowan resigned in August.
The following month, Caputo took a medical leave after he hosted a live video on his personal Facebook in which he accused “deep state scientists” of “sedition” and warned his followers to stock up on ammunition in anticipation of political upheaval. In that rant, which was reported by The New York Times, Caputo said CDC scientists had only changed out of their sweatpants to meet at coffee shops and plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.”'
> It's a fairly typical place for a western country to be at this stage of the pandemic
I'm horrified you can waive it away as "fairly typical" for a western country when Texas has a deaths/1 million population 3 times that of Canada, 4 times that of Denmark and on and on.
Denmark has about half the Covid-19 deaths per capita of the next highest European country based on the figures I've found. They're very much not typical. Neither is Canada, though I haven't been able to figure out what gave them such good results early on since they didn't do anything that unusual and it really doesn't seem to have lasted (their new infection rate crossed that of the US and hit an all-time high recently). Denmark's the usual combination of being reasonably well distanced from Italy geographically and geopolitically, strict border closures starting in March 2020, and a certain amount of lockdown and social distancing mixed in - there's a handful of countries like that with reasonable results. (The other Nordic countries minus Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia spring to mind. Think there's a few others as well, but not many.)
Ranking 16th worst out of 198 is not an enviable or "good" place to be.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?new
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/texas/