SARS-2 Is Not Special

I’ve been reading Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 (London: 4th Estate, 2021), and I’ll probably have more to say about it soon. Here, I’ll just briefly address these remarks (from pp. 139-40), on the sneaky, stealthy nature of SARS-2:

... SARS-CoV-2 is one of the sneakiest viruses public health experts have encountered. The virus has a long incubation time of up to two weeks; it can be spread by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic individuals; it can result in a plethora of random symptoms that resemble other afflictions ranging from allergies to the flu; and it does not produce a severe disease in most individuals, allowing for the majority of infected people to go about their daily lives or not even be aware that they have been infected.

The tendency to characterise SARS-2 as somehow unique, slippery, and unpredictable, is commonplace, but I think it’s wrong.