I suspect that “humanity” was much less incompetent in those books.
I don’t know. In the first book, “The Stand”, Humanity was basically virtually wiped out inside of two weeks, then it became a standoff between Good and Evil within the remaining population.
In the second series of books, which are “Infected”, “Contagious” and “Pandemic”, by Scott Sigler, there were some very darned interesting characters in these books. Here there were more examples of how resilient humans are, and I must say this series of books is excellent, with the first two being superb, and the final book being pretty good, but maybe a bit of a let down versus the first two, but still very good.
The infection in Sigler’s books is of a slightly different nature than the one we currently face... I think!