Can something like this be done to compare/translate subsequences COVID genetic code to SARS and other virus genetic codes. Would be interesting how much overlap there is. And would further the research into where it came from.
Bioinformaticists have been able to do that with traditional algorithms for years (dynamic programming gets you a long way to compute an edit distance for example).
It sounds like you're thinking of "sequence alignment", which is a pretty standard bioinformatics tool.
BLAST (=Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is one common version, and the NIH'S NCBI has a variety of nice online tools here: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
Note that it does take a little bit of background knowledge to interpret:some motifs are just really common, others are shared.
It is probably the first thing that was done once the COVID-19 genome was made public. A quick googling gave me that summary of the results: https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-Does-the-SARS-Virus-...