I find stories like this bizarre and exasperating. You don't have to be any kind of expert to know that a pandemic would devastate the world. And it certainly

I find stories like this bizarre and exasperating. You don't have to be any kind of expert to know that a pandemic would devastate the world. And it certainly isn't something that was discovered in 2019. Planners have been contemplating this sort of thing for decades, if not centuries. The question is not "Should we not have done more knowing this might happen?", which is useless. Rather it's "Considering all of the various awful things that might happen, are we allocating our resources correctly?" It may very well be that we forseeably did not, but there are a lot of other really serious risks, and getting this tradeoff right isn't trivial. We can't spend an infinite amount of money on everything.