During the first 2 months of the current outbreak, Covid-19 spread rapidly throughout China and caused varying degrees of illness, and patients often presented without fever, and many did not have abnormal radiologic findings.
Binformatics analysis on a virus genome from a patient with 2019-nCoV infection and compared it with other related coronavirus genomes provide the basis for starting further studies on the pathogenesis, and optimizing the design of diagnostic, antiviral and vaccination strategies for this emerging infection.
In a surveillance study for CoV in noncaged animals from the wild areas of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, a CoV closely related to SARS-CoV is identified from 23 (39%) of 59 anal swabs of wild Chinese horseshoe bats by using RT-PCR and the presence of a 29-bp insertion in ORF 8 of bat-SARS- coV genome suggests that it has a common ancestor with civet SARS -CoV.
It appears that bats and birds, the warm blooded flying vertebrates, are ideal hosts for the coronavirus gene source and birds for Gammacoronavirus and Deltacor onavirus, to fuel coronav virus evolution and dissemination.
The detection of SCoV-like viruses in small, live wild mammals in a retail market indicates a route of interspecies transmission, although the natural reservoir is not known.
The data support the existence of a novel group 2 coronavirus associated with pneumonia in humans, CoV-HKU1, from a 71-year-old man with pneumonia who had just returned from Shenzhen, China.
The apparent favourable clinical response with lopinavir/ritonavir and ribavirin supports further randomised placebo controlled trials in patients with SARS and shows that age, hepatitis B carrier status, and lack of treatment with this antiviral combination were independent predictors of an adverse outcome.