Influenza or Immunodeficiency — How did the Categorical Rationale go Wrong?

Albeit it was not fully understood when we were caught off-guard with the first-known outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002 in Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China (PRC), the structural similarity of its Spike 2 (S2) protein to human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) was confirmed two years later [1]. The almost-a-decade inaction since its emergence, seen in Figure 1, is not a single-country phenomenon. Even though the reasons are undetermined yet, global institutional under-reporting of the SARS-CoV deaths is statistically characteristic, where all other countries’ reported data happened to coincide with the regression model from the viral geological emergence origin. Subsequently, SARS-CoV was categorized only in the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) in 2008, and that was the global institutional basis for the rationales in decisions and operations behind the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).