HIV/AIDS probably fits the bill or comes close. It doesn't seem as drastic as covid, because of the means of transmission. However, it was newly discovered in many living people's lifetime, and it did spread throughout the entire world relatively quickly.
The others that I remember being scary in media reports contemporaneous with the Winamp-ish era were Ebola (discovered in the '70s, an outbreak in '95), and SARS (2003), but thankfully those never spread worldwide.
> HIV/AIDS probably fits the bill or comes close. It doesn't seem as drastic as covid, because of the means of transmission
Actually, I take back what I said. Looking back at the perception of HIV/Aids (or "GRID" was it was originally known) it's terrifying in context because for a number of years there wasn't any idea about the nature of the disease nor how it spread - whereas with Covid we were able to narrow-down the virus' means of transmission within months.
I didn't intend to put you on the spot. I was equally surprised when I looked up the numbers. I knew HIV/AIDS death numbers were bad, but not that bad.
And as an FYI, from the same UN site (abridged): Yearly HIV/AIDS deaths have been reduced by 60% since the peak in 2004. In 2019: 690k deaths. In 2004: 1.7M deaths.
Things weren't necessarily better in the past.
Technology and science developments help! It's not all tech gloom.
The others that I remember being scary in media reports contemporaneous with the Winamp-ish era were Ebola (discovered in the '70s, an outbreak in '95), and SARS (2003), but thankfully those never spread worldwide.