The new corona virus, which is spreading from China, has only been known for weeks. Most of what is currently published and reported by the media is provisional. Understanding the new virus is a process. Read here what has so far been considered safe, probable and still uncertain.
What we know for sure
The new virus is related to Sars and Mers
The novel virus with the provisional name 2019-nCoV is a pathogen from the family of coronaviruses, These viruses can infect humans and various animals. In humans, they can cause harmless colds and even fatal diseases. Corona viruses are also responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome, Sars for short, and for Mers, which stands for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. During the largest Sars epidemic to date in 2002 and 2003, 774 people died worldwide. More than 800 people have died of Mers since 2012. Like its relatives, the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV can also cause severe pneumonia in infected people.
Common symptoms are fever and cough
Some infected people have little or no signs of disease, others become seriously ill or even die from the consequences of pneumonia. Symptoms that, according to the first scientific publications, are quite common are fever, cough and shortness of breath. But muscle and headache as well as diarrhea can also occur (The Lancet: Chen et al., 2020). When doctors examine patients in the hospital using computed tomography, they often see signs of bilateral pneumonia.
The outbreak originated in Wuhan
Where did the new corona virus come from?
Coronavirus 2019-nCoV first appeared in December 2019 on a fish and wildlife market in central China’s Wuhan.
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Starting from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, that has virus spread out further. The first cases in which people were infected with it were detected there (The Lancet: Huang et al. 2020). Thousands of cases are now known, the majority of them in China. However, more than 20 other countries have now reported infections with 2019-nCoV. At the beginning of February, the first death outside of China became known – in the Philippines. The World Health Organization (WHO) regularly publishes the latest outbreak figures on its website. It is uncertain whether a wildlife market was the origin of the outbreak.
The virus originally comes from bats
Chinese scientists examined the genes of the new coronavirus in samples from lung secretions from infected patients. Accordingly, it is approximately 79 percent similar to the Sars corona virus, which originally comes from bats (The Lancet: Lu et al., 2020). However, 2019-nCoV is even more closely related to Sars-like viruses that were found in bats in 2018. In these cases, the genetic makeup was 88 percent identical. “It is very certain that the virus was originally circulated in bats,” says the virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit
from the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. However, it is not certain that bats passed directly to humans.
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