The Science of the virus itself
By Emily Zimmerman
The virus that is plaguing people all across the world is a coronavirus. The official name of the virus is SARS-COV-2, and the disease that it causes is called COVID-19.
Other diseases caused by coronavirus include severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Research evidence leads scientists to believe that these diseases originated from bats. While Netflix’s new documentary “Coronavirus: Explained” proves that COVID-19 did originate from bats.
When a virus spreads from animals to humans, it is considered a zoonotic virus.
The Ecohealth Alliance was created to monitor diseases in animals that could possibly evolve and become zoonotic. The President of the Ecohealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, estimates that there are around 1.5 million viruses in wild life that we don’t know about yet.
“Any one of those could be spilling over into the human population right now,” said Dr. Daszak. “We know some pretty lethal ones, but we expect that there are others out there that are more lethal that are better at being transmitted,where we’ve got no drugs and no vaccines. They’re the big risk.”
According to the CDC, this coronavirus is spread through droplets when people sneeze, cough, or speak, and can enter directly through people’s eyes, nose, or mouth.
The virus can also live on many surfaces for hours, so people can pick it up on their hands and infect themselves if they touch their face, something the average person does 20 times an hour according to the NCBI.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has tried to impart the importance of washing your hands in White House press conferences.
“Wash your hands as often as you possibly can, and I know you’re not always in the position to be able to wash your hands, but wash them as much as you can,” said Dr. Fauci.
Alanna Shaikh, a global health consultant who specializes in strengthening health systems, explains how this epidemic is a direct result of human actions in a Ted Talk.
“When we burn and plow the Amazon rainforest so that we can have cheap land for ranching, when the last of the African bush gets converted into farms, when wild animals in China are hunted to extinction, human beings come into contact with wildlife populations that they've never come into contact with before, and those populations have new kinds of diseases: bacteria, viruses - stuff we're not ready for,” said Shaikh.
“Bats, in particular, have a knack for hosting illnesses that can infect people,” said Shaikh. “But they're not the only animals that do it. So as long as we keep making our remote places less remote, the outbreaks are going to keep coming.”
Netflix’s documentary on the coronavirus explains that because antibiotics don’t work against viruses and herd immunity would cause too large of a death toll, people must remain indoors to reduce the spread of the virus until a vaccine is created and tested.
For updates and information regarding this coronavirus, visit the CDC website. More information is also available from the World Health Organization (WHO).
New microscopic imagery of novel coronavirus SARS-COV-2. Photo by NIAID.