I agree, it's important to shine the spotlight on their actual failures.
Whether it was a failure to not have the right systems to deal with the pandemic in the first place is a complicated question. It quickly becomes a philoshopical question. I don't blame South Korea for not being able to deal with MERS, personally. I'm sure many in South Korea do, because we like having people to blame. It makes the problem easier to live with.
In the UK, if one of the political parties suggested we should spend billions on pandemic preparedness and take billions away from the military, perhaps lots of people would agree now but few people would have agreed then. I don't blame past versions of ourselves for thinking that way. The question would have (and did) turn to "if we are going to take away billions from the military then we should spend it on these 10 other real issues we're facing now, rather than that one issue we might have". If we spent all of the money we would like to on preventing all generational and existential risks from ever materialising, we would destroy society ourselves before something else could. That's just the nature of the problem. It would be nice if that was all someone's fault but it's just a consequence of existence, an unsolvable problem, just a problem we need to manage to survive.