Looking at the number of scholarly papers focusing on major disease outbreaks over the last 80 years, as found in the U.S. National Institutes of Health PubMed database, shows a massive spike in the number of papers on SARS CoV, which includes several types of coronaviruses, including the one that causes COVID-19. Even when other outbreaks emerged, like polio in the 1940s, HIV in the 1980s, and Zika and Ebola in the 2010s, they did not attract as much research attention. Influenza, which kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year, has also not seen as much research interest.
