That’s wishful thinking but more fantasy than reality. Neither of the other two transmitted as easily as this current version. While MERS was much more deadly it was much easier to contain. SARS transmitted person to person but virulence matters. If it transmits but is harder for me to pass it to you it’s much easier to use contact tracing and isolation to stop it over time. Any chance at containment with COVID was lost a long time ago because it is so efficient at being passed from person to person. That’s the main reason we are now in a pandemic. A lot of people don’t know this but after leaving MT in 2001 I was hired at CDC. I worked the SARS outbreak in 2002/3. This one is very, very different.
That said keep your eye on Mexico. Things are about to turn dire there and in parts of Latin America. We are a long way from seeing the worst of this whereas we were already seeing the benefit of the mitigation measures at this stage with the other two. Don’t be surprised to see a massive military presence on the southern border in the weeks ahead.
We graduated the same year and ended up working at the same place.
I disagree with it being fantasy as much as we don’t now what is going to happen. Transmission may slow like most enveloped viruses and then return, it may not slow at all in high temperature relying on public health polices to slow it or it possibly could disappear. I don’t think it will disappear, but looking at molecular characteristics and talking to some coronavirologists, SARS-Cov1 shouldn’t have disappeared like it did.