Conveniently, just as government performance fell, the data collected to assess government performance shrank as well

We are going to be seeing the consequences, and misreading the consequences, of the governments disastrous response to Covid-19 for years to come.  One of the principle consequences has been at least the disruption in data sets and often the weakening of data sets.  

How many contracted Covid-19 and how many died of it?  We don't know.  The government created tremendous financial incentives for hospitals and doctors to find Covid cases so they found Covid cases.  Some of which actually were Covid deaths and many of which were deaths ascribed to Covid but not confirmed.

Another example has been the FBI crime data.  Many of the largest police departments ceased to report their crime statistics to the FBI during Covid-19 and after the George Floyd riots.  The lowest crime parts of America continued reporting making it appear that crime had fallen whereas what really happened was not a reduction in crime but a reduction in the reporting of crime.  

Here's another example.  From Switch to Web-Based Surveys During COVID-19 Pandemic Left Out the Most Religious, Creating a False Impression of Rapid Religious Decline by Landon Schnabel, Sean Bock, and Michael Hout.  From the Abstract:

Religion appears to have taken a nosedive during the pandemic, including previously persistent forms of intense religion such as strong affiliation and biblical literalism. However, this apparent secularization is the result of mode effects. The gold standard General Social Survey (GSS) switched to online rather than face-to-face interviews and the response rate plunged to 17%. Parallel analyses of GSS panel data demonstrate that this mode switch introduced substantial nonresponse bias. Illustratively, biblical literalism was almost 50% higher among those who declined to participate (36%) than those who participated in the online survey (25%). Rather than declining, intense religion persisted if not rose over time among those willing to participate in a push-to-web survey. The apparent decline was simply a result of disillusioned, distrusting, disinformed, disadvantaged, and disconnected people being much less likely to agree to participate. Intense religion and other social phenomena are underrepresented and thereby underestimated in online surveys with substantial nonresponse, including those using population sampling methods. The trend in survey research toward these types of surveys could be expected to give a false impression of secularization and other social change going forward—including making society look less disillusioned, distrusting, disinformed, disadvantaged, and disconnected than it is.

The legibility of the nation and its challenges took a big hit during Covid-19 and the George Floyd riots.  Some of the data reporting is being restored.  Others not so much.  Just as government performance turned remarkably bad, we suddenly had less data by which to see how bad it was.