Ed Yong has a pretty clear explanation of what little is known. Unfortunately this was something of a backwater field until recently: [...]
Ed Yong has a pretty clear explanation of what little is known. Unfortunately this was something of a backwater field until recently:
Susan Weiss, of the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying them for about 40 years. She says that in the early days, only a few dozen scientists shared her interest—and those numbers swelled only slightly after the SARS epidemic of 2002. “Until then people looked at us as a backward field with not a lot of importance to human health,” she says. But with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2—the cause of the COVID-19 disease—no one is likely to repeat that mistake again.
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“The scary part is we don’t even know how many people get normal coronaviruses every year,” Frieman says. “We don’t have any surveillance networks for coronaviruses like [we do for] flu. We don’t know why they go away in the winter, or where they go. We don’t know how these viruses mutate year on year.” Until now, research has been slow. Ironically, a triennial conference in which the world’s coronavirus experts would have met in a small Dutch village in May has been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Ed Yong has a pretty clear explanation of what little is known. Unfortunately this was something of a backwater field until recently:
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