It's not a particularly satisfying answer, but contagious diseases jumping to humans and causing small outbreaks is not a particularly uncommon event. Most of the time, those outbreaks die out without becoming a large scale pandemic. This is due to both nature, and significant investments in global contagious disease response infrastructure.

Saying a given outbreak is probably not going to be as bad as covid is probably correct, because most aren't.

I should also mention that the public health infrastructure that normally prevents epidemics has been significantly weakened over the past few years. This does tilt the table towards pandemic.