Herpes is another virus that when’re just now finding far removed links to, alzheimer's disease being one.
If you read up on measles, mumps, polio, typhus, etc and look at the various complications, you'll realize there is nothing that special about covid19.
Lot of these diseases have far milder courses in children than adults. Polio I think is also often asymptomatic. Mumps can cause sterility. Even consider after the Spanish Flu in 1918 there was a 10 year long epidemic of sleeping sickness. That might, might not be related.
Also now I'm in my 50's I have half a dozen friends who used to be healthy and vibrant who now appear to have some sort of chronic fatigue syndrome. Old age? Post viral syndrome? No idea but makes me nervous. And there are the two older people I knew who had lingering effects from polio who both died in middle age.
Those make Corona look like the sniffles.
(Source: see username. I've seen inside a few of the US academic funding sausage factories, and it's not pretty.)
I have a vague sense of the rationalizations of that, there's less competition, more chance of discovering something revolutionary, but...
I couldn't help thinking, where are the companies trying to change the world with moonshots that address common diseases? My kneejerk reaction is that incentives must be screwed up at some level of regulation.