Multiple warnings had been issued. Researchers have alerted the international scientific community for years about the danger of the coronavirus.
The first warning dates back to 2013, 7 years ago. That year, the Chinese virologist and researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Zheng-Li Shi, and his team, identified two coronaviruses close to SARS-CoV, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, in a bat. infectious agent behind the 2003 SARS epidemic that killed 774 people worldwide.
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CoV-WIV1 is then considered a particularly harmful virus because it has a converting enzyme 2 or ACE2, explains Futura Sciences. It is thanks to this cellular receptor that the virus responsible for SARS infected the human organism. And we now know that this virus shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the new coronavirus identified in January 2020 in the city of Wuhan.
But that’s not all. In 2015, researchers from the University of North Carolina published a study in the journal Nature Medicine: “A cluster of SARS-like bat coronaviruses threatens to emerge in humans.”
A year later, these same scientists once again alerted to the virulence of the coronavirus and affirm in an article published in the journal PNAS that CoV-WIV1 is “ready to emerge in humans”. They point out that it has the capacity to directly contaminate humans and that human-to-human transmission is possible.
Finally, specifies the site of the scientific magazine, another study published in 2018 had reported the presence of antibodies to bat virus, SARS-CoV type, in certain inhabitants of the province of Yunnan (southwest of China) .
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