You're just speculating that the dozens of other coronaviruses all caused global pandemics that just went unrecorded or occurred in pre-history, then.
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That's unlikely in a world without intercontinental travel, but lots of epidemics, almost certainly. And i'm not saying unrecorded, there are hundreds of historically noted waves of disease where we can't actually tell what the disease was looking back. If you look at lists of historical epidemics, the causes may as well be listed as "the hell if we know" until you get to bubonic plague and influenza, and even now researchers are looking back and thinking "actually, the pandemic in 1899-1890 may have not been the flu, it might have been a coronavirus."
Consistency in natural phenomena is one of the basic assumptions of science. It's not a huge supposition to suggest nature has repeating patterns.
That other novel coronaviruses are sometimes also deadly when they initially apeared doesn't mean we should take this one lightly, you fucking ghoul. We know a bunch more shit now than we used to, setting the acceptable pandemic response bar at the "Miasma Theory is starting to die down" level is pathetic
That's a pretty liberal use of the word "we", since I'm not sure what you think you've learned.
That's not what your supposition is based on, though.
There have been 7 human coronaviruses recognised, and none of the other 6 have had recorded impacts anywhere even approaching Covid-19. It's not "assuming consistency" to take a single data point and then assume the same of the other 6 data points without evidence.
I learned that a distressing number of people, and a particularly distressing number of Christians, would rather step over my dead body than be mildly inconvenienced
But the "we" in the previous statement was in regards to humanity's general medical expertise
You have it backwards. I'm taking the known end state of 6 data points, and presuming the 7th data point will follow the same pattern. You want to suggest the other 6 didn't have the same impact, and therefore my conjecture is already misplaced, but you believe that entirely without reason.
So your perspective hasn't changed at all, got it.
Why would my perspective change when I have't received any new data points? Y'all aren't in a hurry to prove me wrong
Your presumption is not merely that the 7th data point has the end state. It is quite clearly that the other 6 shared the same early stage as the 7th.
Luckily for us, I can click back to the previous page...
Would you look at that! One of us (not me) was speaking with with the confidence of a time traveler who went and checked, and the other talked about unknowns. Interesting.
In the absence of any evidence of something occurring, that thing not occurring is the null hypothesis.
I might also say there haven't been any global moth plagues. Not because I've time travelled and checked, but because there's no record of it happening, no evidence, and no reason to think there were. And we would kind of expect that.
a) These viruses exist around the globe. That is at minimum evidence that they spread at some point in the past.
b) The behavior of the current related virus is itself evidence for what viruses back in history may have done.
c) Most of history is impossible to provide evidence for, you can't just assume nothing ever happened.
d) That's not what a null hypothesis is.
A) Nobody is disputing that viruses spread. There's quite a lot of clear water between "spread" and "equal one of the largest scale pandemics in human history".
B) Very flimsy evidence. We have novel viruses all the time that don't have one hundredth of the impact of Covid-19.
C) if you want to speculate on the travails of viruses in pre-history, go right ahead. I see no reason to believe that novel viruses suddenly, on average, became far less virulent and dangerous once we started recording them.
Yeah, that's what happens when no new information shows up.
Do you just spontaneously start believing different things for no reason?
No, but if you aren't taking in new information all the time, you're doing that to yourself.