You could predict a pandemic at some point (and given the parameters of a pandemic say it would have to look something very much like COVID), it's very difficul

You could predict a pandemic at some point (and given the parameters of a pandemic say it would have to look something very much like COVID), it's very difficult to predict any given pandemic. In the same way that you could predict that there would be another war in europe, and roughly who would be on each side, but not the exact circumstances by which it would break out. And it's usually easy to find someone predicting any given event after it happens, because there's a lot of people saying lots of different things about the future (see market crashes for another great example).