It's interesting to see how, at every stage of this pandemic, people leap from the event being unusual to the virus defying the normal rules of its kind, when in reality it's the confluence of a range of fairly typical features that have fueled this pandemic.
This has important consequences for how people respond to the pandemic. Instead of continuing to expect highly unusual things to happen, it's far better to understand what is going on as a series of predictable things that follow from the basic biology of this virus.
You can see this from the very beginning of the pandemic involving the zoonotic origins of the virus. Lot's of hand-wringing a fear mongering about this - but the reality is that many human viruses were very recent transfers from wild or domesticated animals.
This is obviously not a good thing, and there are a lot of things we can and should do to reduce this. But it doesn't make SARS-CoV-2 unusual. Indeed this is pretty much the rule for novel viruses entering the human population (cf SARS, MERS, Ebola, influenza, etc...).
Early in the epidemic there were tweets about how unusual a virus with an R0 (the number of new infections that arise from each infected person) of ~3 is. This is of course a problem. But it's not unusual - successful viruses have to have R0 > 1, and many are much higher than 3.
SARS-CoV-2 has a fairly high case fatality rate of somewhere between 1 and 3 percent. Bad, yes. Highly unusual, no. Much worse than colds or seasonal flu. But by no means unprecedented - c.f. Ebola (90%), yellow fever (~5%), rabies (100%).
Take a virus w/an R0 or 3, that has never been seen in humans before, have it emerge in a highly populated city with lots of transport links around the world, and what happened next - a pandemic - was completely predictable.
Now that doesn't mean every detail was predictable - there's a lot of chance involved in where it spread first, which places got hit hardest earliest, which people were infected and so forth - but the basic dynamics went pretty much by the book.
And there was and still is a lot of uncertainly about things like how fast it spreads, who it affects the worst, how many people get infected without symptoms and so on. These details matter a lot. But nothing about the way events unfolded was outside of range of expectation.
This is important because it is precisely BECAUSE all this was so predictable that epidemiologists and public health officials got so alarmed. The weren't guessing that this would be a disaster - they were predicting it based on a long history of studying typical viral behavior.
All the people who are complaining that the number of deaths keep getting revised down as if this is a failure of modeling or a failure of understanding of the virus - it's not - this is, again, a predictable consequence of people responding to the pandemic w/social distancing.
The latest manifestation of this is the widespread fear that somehow people infected with SARS-CoV-2 are not going to develop protective immunity. This would be HIGHLY unusual - and the only reason this is getting any play, it that people still expect this virus to be unusual.
There's a great thread on this from @TheMenacheryLab:
None of this is to say that this is a garden variety virus - it's clearly not, especially in its clinical manifestations. But it's also not an extreme outlier either, in the sense that would render applying our vast knowledge base about viruses and their behavior invalid.
This is important, because, moving forward, we have to make a choice about whether or not we anchor our decisions around the idea that many aspects of the virus and pandemic are reasonably predictable.
With so many things - especially the dynamics of how governments, society and individuals respond - very difficult to model, it would be extreme folly to give in to the false but pervasive notion that we are driving completely blind.
