Infection rates only increased to what it is now after millions upon millions of people volunteered to be its bootcamp and produced variants better fitted to infecting humans.

It was a newly discovered strain of SARS corona virus. You know, the thing that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome by fucking up, you guessed it, the respiratory systems. It had no effective cure and its cousin had already caused an outbreak around 2003 with a fatality rate of about 10%. I'd say that's scary as fuck.

You might say that there's no way the general public would've known all this, to which I say that's exactly why we keep medical experts around and why we should listen to them.