I voted for a President of the United States, not the Premier of China.
Everyone knew not having testing ready was a mistake. The first thing Pence's task force went out to do was to see if they could unscramble the 3M attempt and then promise 1,000,000 kits by the end of the week. C'mon, be serious. Testing is step 1 and they fucked it up. Perhaps it was too late by then. But they paid zero attention to it until coverage started to hurt.
And someone turned down the WHO testing kit in favor of the one CDC was developing. A CDC that was underfunded and had no backup plan.
Every infectious disease expert said the same thing early: a travel ban buys you time with these viruses. They did not use that time effectively.
When your media strategy is to say verifiably false things very loudly to dominate headlines, you are exacerbating, not downplaying your coverage. Its not an unintended consequence, its the intended consequence.
This is the same thing that happens each time. The details are different but the patterns and weak points are the same. The virus is novel, the slow reaction to a known problem isn't. Put it into business friendly terms. The failure to have testing be prioritized and ready to go has meant that closing down society is the one preventative step left that we have to slow progression of serious illness. Its a colossal failure.