"Easy" is kinda a "for whom?" question.

The pandemic was easy for me to live through because I'm just like that; and it was easy for the disease to evolve in a wet market*…

… but that whole "flatten the curve" thing was because it came within a hair's breadth of overwhelming national healthcare systems and this was obviously a risk to be mitigated before the event.

* this happened in wet markets many times, not just COVID; and this will happen again if steps aren't taken to mitigate that, no matter what you may think about lab leaks which do also happen sometimes because humans are fallible and do make mistakes on occasion.