COVID-19 has presented the world with something not seen before in our lifetimes: a global breakout of a disease that nobody on Earth has an immunity to. While SARS and MERS did indeed see serious infections and caused hundreds of deaths, the scale was nothing like we've seen with the current novel coronavirus outbreak.
To date, there have been almost 175,000 cases worldwide and more than 6,600 deaths, and those are only the ones we know about.