What is the Coronavirus and how did it spread?

• Health officials have linked the virus to a similar outbreak in the past named severe respiratory syndrome (SARS).
• SARS has no specific treatment till date.

An outbreak of a new virus in China has killed at least 25 people and infected more than 1000 globally. This has led the health officials to dig deeper into similar outbreaks from the past and come up with the findings of a similar outbreak in the past named severe respiratory syndrome (SARS).

The first case reported of SARS emerged in November 2002, which infected more than 8,000 people and resulted in nearly 800 deaths. Experts called SARS the first pandemic of the 21st century as it spread across 29 countries. The disease has not been seen in humans since July 2003.

SARS was followed by Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) that emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and also spread internationally. The MERS coronavirus also hailed from animals, in its case bats, but used domesticated mammals, camels, as a bridge for reaching humans.

Both the SARS and MERS have no specific treatment till date.

According to National Geographic, SARS and the new virus, which first originated in a wet market in the city of Wuhan, China, both belong to a family called coronaviruses. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, some of which cause illness in people, while others circulate among animals, like camels, cats and bats.

The coronavirus like SARS are zoonotic, meaning that these start in animals and then spread to humans. Zoonotic diseases rank among the world’s most infamous. Coronaviruses not only spread via the air and the respiratory tract, but the virus can also spread if fecal matter comes in contact with another creature’s mouth.

While MERS was lethal, it was milder in scope to SARS worst-case scenarios, but it is unclear whether the Wuhan virus is going to evolve into something that's more pathogenic.

While it has been confirmed that the coronavirus or the Wuhan virus spreads from human to human it still remains unknown how easily or sustainably this virus is spreading, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nancy Messonnier said.

Director of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity Ian Lipkin, whose lab worked with Chinese officials to develop early diagnostic tests for SARS, said that it is unclear whether or not the Wuhan virus is simply going to die out or whether it's going to evolve into something that's more pathogenic.

“We don’t have any evidence yet of superspreaders, and hopefully we never will. But we also don’t know how long this new coronavirus lasts on surfaces, or how long people will continue to shed virus after being infected,” Lipkin said.