COVID-19: why not learn from the past?

With 194 million cases worldwide and 4.16 million deaths (as of July 2021), the ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is second only to the 1918–1920 flu pandemic in the number of (estimated) cases and deaths. However, while scientific knowledge on the H1N1 virus was non-existent in 1918, the same cannot be stated regarding the dramatic potential of novel coronaviruses, like the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), to cause harm to human health. The following is a brief summary of the past 17 years of knowledge about coronavirus that the scientific community had already gathered regarding the potential threat to humanity of this type of emergent virus and, therefore, the evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCs) and the World Health Organization (WHO) seem to have ignored or at the very least underestimated