What Other Coronaviruses Tell Us About SARS-CoV-2

April 29, 2020

(Quanta Magazine) – COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, have focused the public’s attention on coronaviruses like never before. But medical researchers have more than half a century of experience with this family of viruses — by the time they identified the first human version in 1965, multiple animal coronaviruses were already known to exist. Since then, dozens of additional coronaviruses have been discovered in wildlife, livestock and humans. We now know of four that cause the common cold: HCoV-OC43, HCoV-229E, HCoV-NL63 and HCoV-HKU1. (HCoV stands for “human coronavirus.” A number of other human strains were also reported in the 1960s, but they were lost and not studied in detail.) Since 2003, we have identified more serious human coronaviruses, which have caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and now COVID-19.