What we're going through now is indeed unusual, but only in terms of its scale and scope. We're better prepared to deal with it in terms of health technology than previously (for instance we have ventilators, but not enough in the right places). The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 is mentioned a lot as an example, but that overlooks the much smaller-scale but yet constant contagious afflictions that affected people and destroyed lives year after year. Before vaccines, antibiotics, and a better understanding of human health, death was more of a presence in many countries compared to today. Remember polio? No? Good, you don't want to.
For a child in the first decade of the new century, 1900-1909, to make a list titled "The Years We Had Contageous Deseases", reminds us of what it was like to some extent. (The quoted child happens to be the anthropologist Margaret Mead, in Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King, from Doubleday, 2019, p. 127)
I'd also recommend The Ghost Map, by Johnson, 2006.
