While the global scale of the covid lockdown was indeed unprecedented, quarantining and curfews were indeed used during the Spanish flu, bubonic plague and other widespread diseases. Back then, that was sufficient because population density was lower and the world was much less connected in general. Nobody went on a 2-week holiday trip to Bali during the bubonic plague, or huddled up in huge skyscraper office buildings for work, so the spreading of the disease was already slower.

Some years before covid (I think it was in 2012 or 2013), we got dangerously close to an ebola pandemic. That would have been fun, I imagine, I love bleeding out of all orifices and dying, my favorite past-time.