I think best practice for emergency preparedness, universally, is that you exercise. You practice and practice, and then, when the earthquake happens, you are basically running on muscle memory. In general, we can say that exercising those pandemic plans, and practising, would have identified issues in our response at that time, during the practice.
The challenge becomes how to respond to that. Do you have the willpower and the budget to make the changes to the plans that you then implement in response to the deficiencies that you have found, and then have to practice again? It is an iterative process, which, in the absence of a pandemic, can seem like a waste of money because you're spending all this money and not preventing anything, just preparing.
Again, it's that challenge of people who aren't emergency experts or public health experts being the decision-makers. They don't keep their eye on the prize; and the prize, at this point, was being prepared to respond to a coronavirus pandemic.