K. Murray, B. Gold, R. Shamir, C. Agostoni, Reinaldo Pierre-Alvarez, S. Kolaček, E. Hsu, J. Chen
Journal of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition, 2020
n infectious disease with a new viral pathogen has garnered the world’s attention over the past 3 months in ways that no A other human infection has to date. Coronavirus disease 2019, also known as COVID-19, is accelerating around the world in pandemic proportions. This infectious disease is caused by the novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS CoV 2 (1)], which was first detected in China and has now spread to over more than 150 countries. On March 17, the WHO announced that the number of confirmed cases outside of China had exceeded those inside of China (2), and counts on March 25, showed 413,467 confirmed cases and 18,433 associated deaths, globally (3). The latest global count updates can be found at: https://www.who.int/ emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/. SARS-CoV-2 is a positive-sense, single-stranded RNA virus belonging to the genus Betacoronavirus, and phylogenetically related (88%–89% similarity) to the two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses, bat-SL-CoVZC45 and bat-SL-CoVZXC21. Coronaviruses are capable of rapid mutation and recombination leading to novel coronaviruses that have differing transmission profiles, as was witnessed in the 2002 epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012. Genetic analysis suggests that SARS-CoV-2 is a novel coronavirus (4) that enabled
Cited by 10 publications.
Field of study: Medicine