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.
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.
> 32.7 million [24.8 million–42.2 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.
Hopefully covid-19 could end up causing ~10x fewer deaths.
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.