Evolution has always occurred before our eyes, e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria. I doubt the evolution of Covid changes anyone’s opinion on evolution.
I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution. Not hard to empirically verify in-species adaptations, but I'm still waiting to see coronavirus turn into influenza (etc)
Covid won't change into the flu, that's like assuming a chicken might evolve into it's ancestors species or humans will evolve into apes. Evolution goes forward, not (or rarely) backwards.
It's a completely new species that, up until 2019, did not exist in the human population.
This sort of evolution happens frequently when people are in close contact with animals. Hence the reason European disease wiped out native populations but not the reverse. Also, a direct example of human evolution.
I think this is where we differ. That obnoxious spiky little ball we all now know as coronavirus(es) existed in both humans and bats long before making the "jump". Ignoring the possibility that humans are directly responsible for the new host capabilities, it's not like we watched influenza slowly morph into a coronavirus and cause a new form of havoc. All we saw was an existing "species" that had mutations inside the bounds of its genetic code that enabled it to survive elsewhere.
You might find that pondering the existence of "ring species" proves enlightening. It turns out that "species" isn't even a well defined concept when you look closely enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
(Also, you needn't capitalize "evolution". It's not a god :))
In programming terms, evolution is like tweaking a program a few lines at a time, with the requirement that the program has to still run and be useful after each tweak. You can evolve a C program this way to get a faster, or smaller, or more memory efficient, or more featured C program, but you are not going to be able to evolve a C program into an APL or Haskel or LISP program that way.
That macro evolution is possible is quite amazing and astounding when you stop and really think about the constraints. It is not at all obvious that micro evolution implies the possibility of macro evolution.
It's really something that is best approached from the opposite direction. We see evidence of macro evolution, and then use micro evolution as part of the explanation of how this is happening.