Diseases are close to as old as life. Even diseases have diseases. The present "novel" coronavirus we are facing, was just a predictible result of evolution. It will happen again and we need to understand that.
"Transition To A New Human Ecology" is my project describing how humans create a new ecology to survive and develop in the long term. I've said that it is to replace the hunter-gatherer tribal ecology we left behind. It didn't start exactly that way. It started in high school when my AP Biology teacher commented that "there are many tropical diseases that we've never encountered and know nothing about". It made me wonder what the evolutionary consequence of diseases like that would be. Diseases were and are an ancient threat to pretty much all life. It is an important natural selective effect and unique in ways. Surviving a disease is partly about the luck of having the right immunological combinations to fight the disease. Our genes for immunity are different than any other of our genes. The other part though is that disease works as a general selective effect that will cause any weakened system in the body to fail just as the Covid-19 virus is killing people with underlying health problems. Nothing else works like that and up to 40% of people typically used to die of disease before reproducing. That led me to look at the bigger changes in ecology and the related changes in natural selection. Natural selection is what keeps our genetics healthy ... in its own blunt and brutal way. The obvious question was what will be the effect of the removal of disease as an agent of natural selection by vaccines and other medicine? It's not good. In fact the result would be extremely dangerous. That was the start of my Transition project. It is the driver of all my genetic work. When talking about using artificial selection to replace natural selection, disease is primarily the natural selection I am talking about. A primary effect of disease would be selecting against the random de novo mutations that occur every generation and can cause all kinds of physical and mental health problems. There is an economical and ethical solution availabele though that offeres the potential to do more than just solve some problems..