SARS-CoV-2: A Deadly Serious Science Communications Project
If you are just joining us here on social media, there is a new virus in town. By “town,” I mean human-inhabited Earth. At this point, there is sustained transmission of the virus taking place in multiple countries and the outbreak of this disease, known as COVID-19 and caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, is a pandemic in everything but name.
SARS-CoV-2 is a strain of the original SARS coronavirus that was one of the first major emerging pathogens of the 21st century. The original strain was successfully contained, and for some reason most of society seems to have assumed SARS was canceled.
Unfortunately, the organism in which SARS coronaviruses originated, likely bats, continued to play host to these pathogens, and the contact of individuals in China with bats and other bat-adjacent mammals also continued. Under those conditions, a second spillover event occurred.
In this instance, a slightly different strain emerged, which appears to have traded the severe pathogenicity (a pathogen’s disease-causing capacity) of SARS-CoV-1 for a milder manifestation of disease. COVID-19 has a case-fatality rate somewhere that is thought to be below 2%, while for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-1, the case fatality rate was found to be much higher.
