None of these occurred on anywhere near the current spread or scale. SARS and MERS were almost entirely confined to Asia, Ebola to West Africa, and Zika to South America. The last was most widespread but was still limited to about 10,000 cases outside of South America and Cape Verde. Even then the greatest danger was to the children of pregnant women and, rarely, lasting complications. The number of “deaths from Zika” was <100 in total.

Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.

There were changes after SARS that led to better containment and reporting measures in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.

Sure, the initial cases were clearly messed up, but it has mostly been contained in Hong Kong and Singapore. And with the way this disease has progressed, I would bet many countries are going to overtake China in case counts.

There have been some quite impressive Covid-19 containment campaigns in the Middle East and Africa thanks to improvements brought on by exactly those outbreaks, so maybe.

Yes, I would say that the government response in certain Asian countries was informed by their past experience with these outbreaks.

I credit those for the US and European response being so slow coming.

None of those became major issues in the US or Europe. The media did it's typical the sky is falling thing and then nothing happened.

So, now we have a virus that is hard for us to contain but people haven't taken it seriously until Italy started having crazy day over day numbers.

I think the scale of global impact is different. I’m now turn into a person who religiously wash my hand, and care about hygiene and stuff much, much more often than before, all thanks to this COVID-19.