Opinion: A former CDC director on 3 key questions about the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China
There may or may not always be something new out of Africa, as the saying goes, but there’s always something new out of the microbial world. Scientists find an average of one new pathogen every year. The decade is off to a quick start with a newly discovered virus that started sickening — and sometimes killing — people in Wuhan, China. It may have spread to Japan, and just caused the first infection in the United States.
The new virus is a coronavirus. Some coronaviruses don’t infect humans, others do but cause only minor illness. Some can cause severe illness in a high proportion of those infected by it, like the coronavirus responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which sickened more than 8,000 people globally in 2003, killing nearly 800.
