I would like to believe that, but for now if it comes to biohazard events, I'm not reassured. If we had good enough mitigation strategies today, people generally wouldn't catch communicable diseases so much as they do. And I haven't heard of any potential research on something that could tip things in favour of defense. Again we encounter the same dynamics that make airport security theater ineffective - the assymetry between attack and defense. The defender has to handle all possible attack variations, while the (either human or random in nature) attacker can just focus on one strategy, a strategy that will not be known to the defender beforehand.
For now, the best short-term strategy is infrastructural - basically what the health services are doing today, but even more of it.
I totally agree with you about present surveillance situation being a total Wild West. I have no clue what to do with it, and while I don't really mind data gathering per se, I'm very much against the shenanigans governments and private companies are pulling on us with said data. We desperately need to figure out a good solution.
I think that one obstacle on the road to that solution will be attempting to protect the idea of privacy at all costs. I think we'll end up having to give up a big part of it, or even the whole concept entirely - in exchange for reducing the power it gives to the governments and corporations. For instance, you can't really blackmail people with stuff everyone knows everyone does, because nobody will care.