Also, a lot of governments did take suitable precautions in case Covid was more like the original SARS early on and just got flak for it. This was particularly visible here in the UK, where Public Health England and the government had already planned for another SARS or MERS-like virus and introduced really aggressive testing and contact tracing early on in case this was it. They just got attacked in the press for not continuing that once it became clear this wasn't like SARS and it wouldn't work - and then once they gave in and reintroduced testing and contact tracing as a measure, they were attacked again because (predicatably) it wasn't that effective and the media fuelled endless badly-informed conspiracy theories about the testing and contact tracing program only existing to funnel money to their pals.
Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. For Sars 1 to spread widely, it has to be less deadly. There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious.
But just a tidbit on this statement.
That leaves out the whole question of incubation time. The scary thing about COVID is that it gives you several days to a week or more to walk around spreading the infection before you even know you have it.
That's why the reaction in the public health sector was so dramatic. It was the sort of thing that could have easily been much worse than it has turned out to be.
And it's still only one or two mutations away from living up to the worst-case fears: a seriously-deadly virus that spreads all over the world before anyone knows what's happening. One that large sectors of the population have already been preconditioned to deprecate or ignore.
That's a fine rule of thumb but not something to literally bet your life on. When smallpox was introduced to North America, it wiped out a substantial percentage of the population of the continent (This [1] claims 90%, which might be much but it was a lot).
[1] https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
Covid was essentially "Sars II". If Sars1 had had the qualities needed to be a world wide epidemic, we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Sars1 happened a decade ago. Calling this a "hundred year crisis" seems wholly disingenuous. This event was forecast by quite a few people, the world was terribly unprepared and there's every reason to think the same factors that created this virus will create others much sooner than a hundred years from now.