In March of 2020, I was asked, when requesting a COVID test, if I had traveled recently to China, at a point where the disease was spreading locally throughout Europe and the US. The quality of the bureaucratic response has not improved in the interim.
Governments have had 22 months to figure out how to reason about the disease. At this point, the safe bet is that they’re never going to. Their responses are mostly theatrical, and rarely effective. Worse, though, most of the population hasn’t figured this out.
The anti-vaxxers (for example) believe in a supercompetent conspiracy government capable of perfectly organizing itself to execute some sort of nefarious plan, when for the most part the bureaucracy can’t find its hindquarters even given photographs and a map.
Most other people still believe that the government knows what it’s doing no matter how much evidence piles up about boneheaded decisions that killed tens of thousands.
The press, of course, has been incompetent since the start, or often worse. This article still should give you pause 19 months later. 
Who was competent? The medical profession, medical researchers, and the pharmaceutical industry, and (for example) the dedicated professionals scaling up PPE manufacturing. They deserve our thanks, along with the people who kept global logistics going in spite of the pandemic.
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