We never paid attention to that family of viruses. Now we are. How do we know what we are seeing now is new?
For example, now we are testing people for a certain Corona virus and counting it as significant if the test is positive. Problem is we have no baseline of the prevalence of Corona virus in the population. We have no reference to past years.
It is also amazing how imprecise public health is about flu & pneumonia deaths. The CDC readily admits it estimates the reasons for pneumonia. It doesn't actually prove the cause. But now we have COVID and now we are going to count pneumonia deaths as COVID deaths.
This is not good science.