The joy of stepping into another decade has been shadowed by a shared fear of the new coronavirus across the entire Asia. A newly discovered coronavirus, originating in Wuhan, China, first started breaking out in mainland China in late December last year. The virus has quickly spread globally, infecting over 20,000 people in China and death toll is now 425.
This virus has proven to be slightly less deadly than its close relative, SARS, which has a fatality rate of 9.6% compared to 2.1% of the Wuhan virus. However, the Wuhan coronavirus appears to be capable of spreading faster and easier, leading to serious political and social unrest in China.
In this new publication, researchers used Next Generation Sequencing to obtain both complete and partial 2019 novel coronavirus genome sequence in hopes of finding effective cure. They found that the 2019-nCOV was closely related to to two bat-derived SARS- like coronaviruses (88%), but was less closely related to SARS (79%) or MERS (50%). This research also discovered the potential binding mechanism of the virus, through the the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor in humans.
The virus is now widely accepted to have originated from bats and other wild life animals sold in the Wuhan Wet Market became the perfect vector of the virus to jump to human. As the virus is extremely transmittable, this outbreak could soon become a pandemic. Being from Hong Kong and having lived through the 2003 SARS outbreak, I remember the terror and struggles my family and I had to swim through. The entire city paused overnight and continued to be pressured after.
By cracking the 2019-nCOV genome, we will hopefully learn more about the characterization of the virus and find effective measures to contain it. Meanwhile, it is important stay alert and cautious to prevent another global pandemic from happening.
Lu, R., Zhao, X., Li, J., Niu, P., Yang, B., Wu, H., Wang, W., Song, H., Huang, B., Zhu, N. and Bi, Y., 2020. Genomic characterisation and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding. The Lancet.
Monica Cheung - Feb 4th, 2020
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