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What's your threshold for novelness?

We can't truly know just how novel covid-19 is; we don't have sequences from the database of coronaviruses, and even if we did it might have leaked right after it was collected, without having been sequenced yet.

Is "novel" the right criteria here? If Covid didn't have asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic infectiousness, it'd still be novel but may not have become a pandemic. Therefor may not have even been noticed, no tests developed for it, etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston_virus

funny story, my elementary school was across the playground from this place, but moved out of that location the summer before the virus leak.