Viruses have been partners with animals for hundreds of millions of years, with the earliest
carbon-dating of our interactions going back
300 million years.
Coronavirus is 15% of all
common colds,
so we have absolutely seen this before, absolutely faced this threat before,
and in fact, to a more dangerous degree -
SARS
was a more deadly virus than Covid-19 in terms of deaths-per-case.
The term 'novel' simply means that
someone went through the effort of doing an entire
gene sequencing of the virus,
went to record it, and found that there was no matching sequence.
For regularly mutating viruses, this is an incredibly low bar -
if they wanted to do some good science around this, they could record full gene sequences
throughout the cold season,
record daily 'novel' viruses, and compare the mutations throughout.
Every organism, be it animal, plant, or virus, that is born or created, is 'novel', with differences from their parents.
Their characteristics and behavior will always be similar to their parents, however, as they share the
vast majority of their genetic makeup.
As such, the only difference between this cold season versus those we've managed successfully in the past over
millions of years, is
our behavior in response to it. Even the behavior of this virus has been the same as it has been
every other cold season, during
times our behavior has been the same as today.
