The reality is we've moved more and more inpatient care to hospitalists, who are often overworked, underpaid relative to their workload and generally draw from a higher fmg base.
The ICU folks and subspecialists typically carry the burden and keep sicker patients alive and catch mistakes, which happen because 1) people are human and 2) those doctors taking care of your average patient are not the best and brightest (imo). When you add something like covid, which is both not fully understood but also explosive in the number of cases that can arise, it stresses the system.
Add to that the scarcity of ICU beds (doesn't make economic sense to carry very expensive resources without being as close to capacity as possible), a non unified, often bizarre federal response that places politicians over scientists and physicians, and a public that has enough idiots that confuse mask use and public health initiatives with political issues like abortion, gun control, and taxes and you end with a brutal, embarrassing situation.
Our hospital has about a 3% antibody reactivity rate after almost 2000 hfw have been tested, including ICU and er staff... And there was some serious lack of ppe and ignorance about precautions early on. It means that it's fucking embarrassing that the greatest country in the world can't get their collective heads out of their asses enough despite a large enough heads-up from Italy and China (who btw are now relatively fine) and more medical resources then most other countries. This isn't that hard. Wear a mask, physically distance and use some common sense. Keep doing that and open the economy carefully while contact tracing and locally shutting down as needed until a vaccine is made. Use said vaccine. Move on.
So yeah, it's not surprising that as the workload exceeds our capacities, more mistakes aren't caught and more people die unnecessarily.
It's not gross incompetance. It's just people dealing with a disease that they don't understand fully, under personal risk that clouds thinking further and at numbers that overwhelm.
The only gross incompetance is watching a failed businessman ignore the recommendations of any competent person and waging a war against reason and science.