Any examples you'd like to discuss in particular? "Huge waves" is all a matter of perspective.
What Australia and NZ consider to be "huge waves" are numbers so low that if we had them here (even adjusting for population size), people would switch into "okay, looks like we beat it!" mode.
For instance, Australia seeing 1600 cases a day for the whole country of 25 million people is considered a huge spike.
Adjust that for population size, that'd be like the US only having 21,000 cases per day. That's around the avg number of cases we were having around the 4th of july holiday week when everyone was celebrating that we finally got it under control. We're currently at around 150,000 cases per day on average (with some days going much higher than that)
In many ways, their handling has been terrible and at many points, they were the worst in terms of case rates.
They're on the downward portion of the bell curve now after Delta ripped through their population.
Florida surpasses 50K COVID deaths after battling delta wave
Florida Has the Highest COVID Death Rate in the U.S.
States ranked by COVID-19 death rates: Sept. 21
They have the highest death rate in the nation.
Ron DeSantis did everything in his power to squash mitigation efforts, and promote monoclonal antibodies to placate people who were anti-vaccine. Rather than call out anti-vaxxers like other republican governors did (Hutchinson, Justice, Ivey), he did the "talk out of both sides of his mouth" routine. Where he'd say good things about the vaccine (so that nobody could call him an anti-vaxxer), but then constantly espouse platitudes pandering to the "covid is no big deal" crowd. Things like "in the state of Florida, we're not going to have two classes of citizens!" and "when it comes to masks in Florida, parents will make the choice!"
To use an analogy that I think will hit home for some conservatives.
Heavy reliance on monoclonal antibodies (in order to keep death and hospitalization rates lower among anti-vaxxers) is the same flawed way of thinking as if people touted abortion (instead of the better choice, which would be contraception) as a way to keep teen birthrates and single motherhood rates low.
If people were doing the right thing and taking the effective vaccine that's free and being responsible with how they conduct themselves... use of monoclonal antibodies would only need to be "
safe, legal, and rare" since most people would be responsibly taking precautions. It's not a coincidence that the states with the lowest vaccination rates have the highest need for Regeneron.