LAB 023 - DON'T PASS THE CORONA
CHEAT SHEET
Come back soon to see the cheat sheet for this lab!
ABOUT THE EPISODE
Although flu season in the United states is usually in the fall/winter seasons, the coronavirus outbreak has been DOMINATING the news. The outbreak was first characterized in Wuhan, China in an open air fish market. Since the outbreak began there have been over 24,000 confirmed cases globally, almost 500 deaths, and the numbers keep growing every day. It has gotten to the point where the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the 2019-nCoV a global emergency.
How did this all start?
Scientists have determined that the animal reservoir for 2019-nCoV is bats. So they suspect that bats in Wuhan had some form of contact with the food or the humans at the open air market (the type of contact is unknown).
This is not a strange occurrence, as our populations grow and we encroach on wildlife habitats the instances where humans encounter wildlife will increase. The WHO updates the numbers every day.
Coronavirus gets its name from the Latin word for crown and it was given this because of its physical properties. Coronavirus has spike proteins on its surface that resemble a crown.
So, the coronavirus evolved to be able to infect human host cells and now there is human to human transmission via lung excretions (coughing and sneezing) and fecal-oral transmission. We have seen outbreaks like this before with SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. These were different because of their transmission rates and fatality rates. MERS killed 30% of the infected and SARS killed about 10%. Right now 2019-nCoV has about a 2-3% fatality rate, but we have to take this with a grain of salt because there are a lot of people who are infected but are unable to receive care because of hospital crowding and people who do not know they have been infected because the incubation period for this virus is 2-14 days.
There is still a lot that is unknown about the virus, like how long it lives on surfaces. So while scientists are working to make a vaccine we can keep transmission low by coughing into our sleeves, staying home when we are sick, and washing our hands.
ABOUT THE EXPERT
Our guest in this lab is Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Corbett is a senior research fellow and the scientific lead for the coronavirus vaccine and immuno pathogenesis team at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center.