I feel like the border and travel policies within the provinces of the European Unions empire have large and perhaps exponentially contributed to the growth of cases in already effected areas as I feel is far more critical, the contamination of otherwise fairly isolated or inaccessible sections of europe; Places that would require some serious to reach otherwise
As someone who lives right in the heart of the open-border area, this really isn't the case. Individual states mostly actually shut borders quite rapidly at the height of the crisis: and countries in the Union that do have borders and nominal border checks really haven't fared any better than those without. I guess another way to put it is that unlike what people tend to think, Schengen doesn't make that big a difference to how fast you can enter a country: like, you save a couple of hours in passport queues, but it's not like if I wanted to enter say the US under normal conditions that I'd actually take ages to do it. The EU's free movement rules are more about having the right to live and work and get healthcare in the countries you go to (and the latter is actually pretty useful in a pandemic because it cuts down bureaucracy when treating foreign patients). The EU overalll hasn't been a massive player in COVID, generally healthcare is treated as a national not an EU level problem: the main role of the EU has been helping to negotiate cross-border financial packages to help support states that have been especially hard hit like Italy.
I'd also strongly dispute the idea that the EU is an Empire - I feel like people from the Anglo countries often have and spread lots of weird ideas about how it works. As someone who lives in the middle of it, I'm not uncritical of it, but "Empire" gives a very wrong idea of what the actual problems are. But as you say, that's for a different thread
I do with a couple of caveats agree that there were places where we needed sharper localised responses much sooner (I guess generally politically I'm in favour both of devolving some powers to local level and having some at supranational, and reducing what I think of as the really oversize role of national governments). It's also true in much of Europe that the state-level administrations lack financial and executive power that could be useful at these sorts of times, and that isn't ideal when response planning, I absolutely agree - some additional powers devolved downwards from the national government level could help. In the UK it's getting to the stage where the Conservatives are trying to rewrite local government to have fewer elected officials because running for it is sufficiently pointless (and doesn't pay the bills) so that they struggle to find candidates even in their stronghold areas.
My main caveat to more localism in responses is that if a locality screws it up then it's bad for everyone: so that there needs to be a check on local administrations messing it up. The Austrian COVID outbreak largely initially started at winter sports resorts in the Tyrol, and basically the response to that from local officials was really slow and to assume it would just be a few isolated cases, partly because winter sports is where much of Tyrol's employment comes from and they didn't want to start harsh measures as a result. So state and local government can have its own sets of incentives with all this which aren't ideal either, and may be in some cases more vulnerable to getting it wrong because they don't have the political clout, higher level scientific advice, strategic planning capacity, etc that's more available to national governments.