1) HN didn't know a lot about COVID at the time it emerged into the world. If nobody was trying to inform HN about COVID, is that a failing? Probably not. It seems highly likely to me that the actual scientists had good research done on respiratory diseases and probably got a handle on the situation quickly. HN getting detailed information like this ~12-18 months after the outbreak is actually pretty speedy.
2) The mass media were and probably will continue to be serially wrong about COVID, which is expected of the media. They aren't in the business of being technically correct. If they were interested in being technically correct they'd be too squeamish to work in the media. Ditto if they had any deep understanding of how to control infectious diseases they'd have gone into careers in epidemiology rather than journalism, they're learning this stuff at the same speed as everyone else.
3) There aren't a lot of new learnings in the pandemic. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that governments can't organise themselves to deal with a crisis in less than 6 months, the government isn't a rapid response outfit. Based on the patterns of success and failure of responses it seems recent memory of SARS is a better predictor of outcomes than competence, so a lot of the broad flows of events were probably predictable and predicted in advance. Some new ideas is that this JIT business is madness, and the amount of travel people do spreads diseases in an eyebrow raising fashion (maybe there should be less of it?).
4) I think the real take away from this is that crazy preppers aren't actually crazy, and having some reserves (financial or otherwise) put aside for disasters is still a good idea.