Any society would have been in serious trouble when ninety to ninety-five percent of the population died to pandemics right before the foreigners who carried those diseases invaded.
There has been a serious academic argument that there were limits to how advanced a society could have existed in the New World, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. It argued that, because going north or south takes you into a different climate zone, and going east or west keeps you in the same one, then taking into account natural barriers like rivers and mountain ranges, the Old World had much larger climate zones. Then, most of the megahauna of the Americas went extinct after the first humans arrived and started hunting and burning. He argues that this made it inevitable that the Native Americans would have fewer domesticated animals, especially no horses, and therefore fewer deadly diseases to infect Europeans with than vice versa, since those often evolve in animal species and then hop over. He also makes arguments about how the Natives who remained hunter-gatherers either couldn’t have become farmers, or actually had before the population collapse and couldn’t sustain it afterwards. (For example, the grain highest in protein they might have farmed gives people hay fever.)
If you take this to its logical conclusion, Europeans were the only people in the history of the world who ever missed an opportunity, and everybody else did the best they could given their geographic bad luck. Stephen Jay Gould mocked, for example, the part of the book that suggested that China’s geography caused it to be unified, which prevented it from having the kind of international competition that might have discovered the New World. Paraphrasing: “In the universe where the Chinese colonized North America, wouldn’t we saying, ‘Of course it was inevitable: Europe’s geography left it fragmented into tiny nations like Spain and Portugal, that wasted all their energy fighting each other. They never could have had the resources to conquer the New World?’”
If you want the Americas to do better post-contact, you do want to explain why the pandemics never happened. If they had some kind of limited contact with people like the Vikings who exposed them to measles, smallpox, influenza and the like but didn’t conquer them, and they had already rebuilt from the first wave of those diseases, that might help explain it. Perhaps plants like the potato were introduced to more parts of the Americas through trade. If the point of divergence is earlier, perhaps more domesticable paleolithic megafauna survived.