I think you underestimate the significance of identifying the outbreak as something new. There is a strong tendency to fit our experiences into the framework of

I think you underestimate the significance of identifying the outbreak as something new. There is a strong tendency to fit our experiences into the framework of what we know, and education might even reinforce that tendency (while the health care professionals tried to explain it as a known disease, the villagers suspected there was something else going on.) The discovery was not complete at that point, but it did not begin with isolating the virus, either.