Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by John Kay and Mervyn King, provides an answer to why the world is still so clueless.
Although it was written well before the outbreak, while describing radical uncertainties, the authors had the foresight to say, “We must expect to be hit by an epidemic of an infectious disease resulting from a virus which does not yet exist."Under the existing paradigm, the typical problems which governments and businesses face can be expressed in terms of well-defined models that are based on large amounts of past data.
The behaviours of various players involved can be predicted from this data. In most of these problems, the underlying processes are more or less completely understood.