For those of us who are not medical researchers or otherwise working on the very front lines of covid-related knowledge discovery, it's almost certainly best to tentatively operate under the assumption that covid behaves like other viruses are known to behave. Obviously we can always update our priors as new information comes in, but taking as our starting point "this virus is different and probably worse than all other viruses that have come before" is most likely going to (1) lead you to believe things that turn out to be wrong (most things are normal, few things are abnormal, and betting on "abnormal" out of the gate in the absence of any special information will lead to error most of the time), and (2) unnecessarily freak people out (covid is bad and scary enough to without making things up).
At one point, we had people cooking their mail. We still have people wiping down their groceries and getting anxious about taking walks outdoors. At one point, there was a mini-freak out over people possibly getting re-infected with covid, which we now know is extraordinarily rare, like winning the world's worst lottery. We want people taking sensible precautions. We don't want to mentally traumatize people, and we don't want to put them in a situation where they throw their hands up and say "#### it" either.
Covid is a "novel" coronavirus in the sense that it is a new virus that humans haven't been exposed to before. It's not an alien virus. It took a grand total of one weekend to create a 95% effective vaccine, because it's a virus and we have a pretty good idea of how to deal with viruses.
Avoid other people, wear a mask, wash your hands, and get vaccinated at the first opportunity. Don't get yourself or others worked up over a hypothetical Captain Tripps mutation that probably isn't going to happen.