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by joshocar 2073 days ago
The scientific community has a specific name they use for Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2). Also, timing would also be a very good indicator of what virus the author is talking about. Novel is in relation to the human races exposure to it. For example, there are modern flu virus that trace back evolutionarily to the Spanish flu, but are not novel, they are just "the flu" today. When the Spanish flu jumped to humans it was a novel flu, hence how deadly it was. Again, scientists have clear distinctions between different kinds of flu's, e.g. H1N1, H1N3.