Epidemics only really became a thing once we started domesticating animals and therefore being around live animals for prolonged periods of time. This allowed germs originally adapted to these animals the opportunity to jump over to human hosts, for which they may be more dangerous than for the original host animal.
For more details on this point, I can recommend this video on why the native Americans were killed by diseases imported by the European conquerors, but the conquerors didn't bring any deadly diseases back to Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
At some point we got so obsessed with extending the human existence we forgot how to live with the little time we've got.
60s is the new 40 sounds nice but really it's a sad state.
You can't coexist with something that kills you. Humans could choose to let viruses do their thing. Viruses can't choose to let humans do their thing.
Citation needed.