Dr Greg Moseley: The scariest thing about deadly coronavirus is how much we don’t know
China’s killer coronavirus is just one of thousands of viruses that exist in the world — but one thing about the mysterious bug is giving medical experts cause for serious concern.
National
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The major concerns people have with this new coronavirus is really what we don’t know about it.
There are so many viruses out there — you have no idea. Thousands and thousands of viruses.
The truth is that many of them don’t make people or animals sick, or they cause very minor disease.
“However, some animal viruses like Hendra or SARS can cause serious disease in humans. Many of these terrible viruses exist quite happily in species of animals, but then there’s some event that changes that.”
Maybe you have close contact with an animal, like you’re scratched by one that could be infected.
Maybe you come into contact with products from an infected animal, or there’s a mutation in the virus that makes it able to infect a human.
Once that happens you have a crossover event and it can get into the human population.
“It’s not evolved to be in the human population and we’re not evolved to have it — the balance is wrong and you can get very, very severe diseases in some cases.”
Coronavirus is from a family of different viruses — their sequence and biology are all very similar.
The infections go from viruses that cause what we call the common cold and gastro, that are not terribly severe.
But then on the other end of the spectrum we have SARS and MERS, which are both coronaviruses.
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One of the reasons that there’s so much concern is the story here is very similar to SARS.
It’s a suddenly emerged virus in China, spreading internationally and we don’t know a great deal about it.
The issue with these kind of viruses is that they don’t look very different to other infections. They have quite non-specific symptoms, so at first so it could be flu or a cold.
At this stage we just don’t know how dangerous this virus might be. It’s already infecting a lot of people.
It’s already causing severe disease. It’s already causing fatalities.
But really, it’s what we don’t know that has the potential for it to be very dangerous.
— Dr Greg Moseley is a virologist at Monash University
Originally published as Dr Greg Moseley: The scariest thing about deadly coronavirus is how much we don’t know