The term "reservoir" is used in this context.
It's an exponential factor, so small differences in the value make a big difference.
On the other hand, R0 for SARS-Cov-2 has been estimated as high as 6 by some groups.
median R0 for COVID: 5.7
Flu: 1.3
Cold: 1.5
Of course, R0 is a context-sensitive value, so all this is debatable. But I think claiming COVID is 3x as contagious as the other 2 is not that far off the mark.
'As SARS-CoV-2 has a novel receptor binding interface (compared to SARS) & circles the globe, opportunities for new animal reservoirs become available. We could suddenly see some common animal in the US being a reservoir for this virus for the future'
"South Africa also has reported startling declines, with doctors saying there haven't been a sufficient number of flu cases to even report that the seasonal epidemic happened. And in Australia, the country's National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System recorded only 85 new laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza in the last two weeks of June—a stark difference from the 22,047 confirmed cases recorded during the same time last year."
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/07/24/coronavir...
If that was the case then flu or colds wouldn’t spread the way they do.
Since I've been exposed over the last few months to roughly a million people claiming that COVID19 is no worse than the flu, it prompted me to look up just how many people die or are hospitalized from the flu every year.
US avg annual deaths (prev 9 years): 37,000
US avg annual hospitalizations (prev 9 years): 446,000
Clearly COVID19 is worse than this already (160k deaths, 317k hospitalizations, and more every day).
But put aside the COVID19 comparison, and that is still a lot of people who suffer or die from something that we have tools to prevent. How much of that could be avoided with better flu vaccine uptake, policies that support staying at home when you're sick, and the normalization of wearing masks in public?
Why weren't we already doing all of those things? I only did one of those things, and that feels kind of dumb now.
I talked to a biologist friend about the possibility of those being eradicated as an unintended positive side effect of our anti-COVID efforts, and he suggested that the animal kingdom unfortunately can serve as a zoological reservoir of some of these viruses and could potentially retransmit them back to humans, so it probably wouldn't entirely eradicate them, but it might certainly drastically hamper them for years.
I for one will be happy to take "will not experience a cold or flu for the next... who knows how many years" as a 2020 consolation prize.
Things I did not know while researching this comment:
The common cold costs the US economy $40 billion a year, and Amazon is secretly working on a cure: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/amazon-is-secretly-working-o...
The 2018 flu season cost businesses an estimated $15.4 billion https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/02/news/flu-season-business-co... and sufferers $10.4 billion in hospitalizations and outpatient expenses https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pdf/business/Toolkit_Seasonal_Flu_fo...
That seems to imply that the combined economic benefit of nearly eradicating both could result in an economic boon of $65 BILLION a year, and that's just in the United States! Not to mention all the people who won't die of the flu, etc...