Via Scientific American, Helen Branswell surveys what we know so far: Outbreak Specialists Track Down Recent Coronavirus. Excerpt:
Maria Zambon was having déjà vu. Earlier this fall, she found out about a new coronavirus that had come seemingly from nowhere to kill a Saudi man in Jeddah in June and seriously sicken another. The survivor had been flown from Qatar to a London hospital. His lungs were overwhelmed with infection, his kidneys failing. Virologists at Erasmus Medical Center, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were already working on an isolate from the Saudi man to decode the virus's genetic sequence. They named the virus HCoV-EMC, short for human coronavirus and the institution's initials.
The situation reminded Zambon, director of reference microbiology for Britain's Health Protection Agency, of the SARS outbreak of 2003, which spread from China to as far as Toronto and killed 916 people. Fortunately, the recent coronavirus appears to be emerging more slowly than SARS did (also a coronavirus). To date, only six cases have been reported—four in Saudi Arabia and two in Qatar. Two of the infections have been fatal.
The gnawing concern, however, is that the virus will start spreading from person to person, fanning out more broadly to infect people around the globe.
