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When We Encroach
By Nana Dadzie Ghansah
He is seen as the first patient who got sick but some researchers believe the virus had already started raging earlier than that December 1st when he was admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China with pneumonia. By December 10, there were 3 more patients and by the end of the month, there were 40 cases.
Soon the world would hear of a virus that was making people sick in Wuhan, China and was going to spread even beyond China.
Initial work by Chinese virologists soon showed what the causative agent was — a coronavirus not found in humans. Now there are several strains of the coronavirus. Four types are found in humans and they usually cause the common cold. The ones found in other mammals are the ones that cause severe disease in humans. The two known ones are severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Whereas the coronavirus that caused SARS was isolated from a civet, the source of MERS is thought to be a camel.
The strain causing the people of Wuhan to get pneumonias was named 2019-nCoV (novel coronavirus). Further work showed it shared 79.5% percent of the structure of another non-human coronavirus that had caused an epidemic in 2002–2003 — the SARS-CoV — and was 96% identical at the whole genome level to a bat coronavirus.
So a virus found in bats is causing…
