In a way, it's not possible to apply the scientific method when dealing with an unknown situation. We didn't have a large global pandemic for a while, the last one, Spanish flu maybe killed more people than WW2. So our politicians are not prepared to handle it, because they are not experts. So what is the reasonable thing to do? Stepping down and creating a party neutral cabinet with experts. Almost no politician said that they have no idea how to handle the situation while stepping down, and that's just criminal.
You can even look at the German government when they had a diversity hire as the Minister of Defense, who never served, while there is a war going on in Europe.
Instead important positions are filled up with ideologs and idiots.
I fully disagree on the first part
"Scientists" are able to analyze existing data, and from that make good predictions for unknown cases and into the future.
As well they always do research on expected future scenarios, "what would be, if".
Those are the key features of a real scientist, I guess.
Especially in this case our Robert Koch Institute had a big data base of all virus epidemics, pandemics and the "seasonal" flu, probably covering over 100 years.
Those epidemiologist's for a long time already expected another pandemic event. Remember, that the Pig Flu about 15 years ago, Ebola, and also AIDS were already epidemic or pandemic diseases. So the medical guys should have been prepared a long time ago.. sure the politicians everywhere have absolutely no clue, neither in medical nor in climate / energy questions.
Another story: In late 2019, Physicists from Göttingen, Aerosol research, only they investigated theoretically on the transport mechanism of viruses under different circumstances like talking, singing, making music, and they made the suiting experiments. They found out the distance of those ominous 1.5m, where the aerosol particles fall down by gravity, and they did practical research on the effectiveness of different kind of face masks. They also investigated on room particle filters for schools.
None of their results were taken over by those government experts, and after 3 years of blind flying, our gvt. was still not able to recognize anything useful, especially our infamous Prof. "Karlchen" Lauterbach, who was by chance my fellow student at RWTH Aachen at that early 1980ties.
Frank