A couple of things to be mindful of:

1) Federal government response is only one factor in how well a country responds, especially in a federalist system like the US;

2) There is likely a fair amount of "luck", based on when initial outbreaks were seeded in Jan./Feb. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1249347640061571072

A decent take is:

The US could have done quite well with this because we have a lot of natural advantages—empowered and largely competent states/localities, good hospitals, innovative private sector, etc—but because of Trump, we squandered those & wound up in middle of the pack.