That's a great question. While I'm not the person who you asked, I'd like to get some examples from you. Which other pandemic outbreak are you referring to? Or are you referring to some communicable disease which isn't a pandemic?
I'm mostly thinking of the flu. I actually don't know if there are any other viruses that take 1000s of lives in the average year. I also don't know why covid is classified as a pandemic and the flu is just normal. What is the criteria? A specific percentage of deaths? Some specific combination of R factor and rate of deaths? Mainly, I think it is clear that if you say 1% deaths justifies massive action but .01% does not, the deaths are still all human lives and so it is literally a claim that decides how much one life is worth. It is an economic calculus on human life, and so in my mind absolutely deserves an objective justification for deciding.
One example analogy would be increased airline safety regulation. More regulation increases ticket prices. Supply and demand means a high price will ultimately cause a family to decide to make a road trip over flying for economic reasons. The chance of dying in a multi hour car drive is far higher than in one hour on a commercial aircraft. You can at least use numbers in this case to say if new regulation is justified based on the expected lives saved.
Apart from the higher numbers a good reason to be concerned about the novel coronavirus is the "novel" part. The 1918 pandemic was initially known as the three day flu but the second wave mutated into a 12 hour death sentence.
