Proactively shutting things down and restricting freedoms are politically impossible to implement. There's no incentive for any single politician to do anything like this because if it actually worked there'd be no visibility to the general public and thus nobody would understand what they actually did.

It's like the proverbial secret goverment agency that stops a bomb from going off and nobody knows what they did.

In politics this mean that the general public would only see the downsides of such measures and not the gains. This would not get a single politician re-elected.

Therefore in terms of politics it's much better and safer to be reactive only rather than proactive. Later speech can include statements "we could not have possibly known", "there was no indication that...", "it was a complete surprise...", "we acted as quickly as possbile..."