Jumping species is a challenge but jumping from mammal to reptile and then back to mammal shows an ability to change and mutate that is terrifying. I am afraid that people these days are ill-equipped mentally to deal with something like this. Most have never had to face anything like this.
My generation was the last to live with it. We ALL wear scars on our shoulders from Smallpox vaccinations. I remember polio vaccines when it was the new miracle cure and had kids in my classes that had to wear braces from the damage of it. The elementary school that I went to was new and had been built especially for kids that had braces from polio. All of the halls were lined with grab bars, there were no steps or stairs, only ramps, all the bathrooms were handicap accessible, there was even a special raised bus area so the kids with polio could come right off the buses whether they were in braces or wheelchairs.
Before WW2 yellow fever killed hundreds of thousands of children. My Mother lost a sister to it. At one time syphilis was a leading cause of death among adult males. Now kids don't even have childhood diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough. I don't think that people now will deal with such things as well as people did that were raised with the possibility of this sort of thing hanging over them. I hope that with all of our vaccines that we now don't find that they have weakened us even as they protected us from individual ailments.
We have had a hundred years now to get soft and think that we were not under the gun anymore. I fear that death has returned to walk among us again. We have defeated so many of the old killers of the past that I think most people these days have no understanding of the true frailty of human life.
