I've maintained for a while the worst thing that happened early on was calling it a "novel coronavirus".
In this context, "novel" is medical/scientific jargon that doesn't mean what the average person thinks it means. It should never have made it to the public, because it created a misunderstanding about what was going on. It simply meant "humans haven't encountered this virus before so no one has immunity". Instead the common understanding became "this virus is so different we can't rely on any previous knowledge and have to start from scratch".
In this context, "novel" is medical/scientific jargon that doesn't mean what the average person thinks it means. It should never have made it to the public, because it created a misunderstanding about what was going on. It simply meant "humans haven't encountered this virus before so no one has immunity". Instead the common understanding became "this virus is so different we can't rely on any previous knowledge and have to start from scratch".