I spent some time in medical school in the late 1980s. (They eventually caught me skulking around in the hall and threw me out.) I don’t remember coronaviruses—orthocoronavirinae, to virologists—being therein addressed as anything serious in terms of human pathology, other than maybe as one of the causes of the common cold. They were mostly associated with birds and bats. That abruptly changed in 2002 with the emergence of the SARS outbreak. Since then, it’s just been one bout of coronaviolence after another, culminating in the present day with the imaginatively named Covid-19. (Imagine if they’d named measles “Morbillivid-54.”) One consequence of this has been a dramatic increase in non-traditional work environments, especially working from home.
