On December 30, 2019, there were several pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China reported by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. Later, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta determined the pneumonia was caused by a coronavirus, which they named 2019-nCoV. 2019-nCoV was similar to the SARS outbreak that happened in China in 2002, where more than 8,000 were infected and 774 died.
Researcher and professor at the Institut Pasteur in Shanghai, Dr. Pei Hao, explains, “To understand the origin of the Wuhan CoV and its genetic relationship with other coronaviruses, we performed phylogenetic analysis on the collection of coronavirus sequences from various sources.”
The results showed that 2019-nCoV has a common ancestor with the SARS, and SARS-like coronaviruses, and belongs to the Betacoronavirus genera. Which indicates that a bat was likely the first host for the virus.
Professor Hao continues, “Furthermore, to evaluate Wuhan CoV health risk for human transmission, we performed structural modeling of its spike protein that is critical for coronavirus-host interaction and evaluate its ability to mediate human infection. So, the Wuhan CoV poses a significant health risk for transmission cross-species or between humans through the same infection mechanism of the SARS-CoV, e.g. S-protein - ACE2 interaction.”
The results show that human-to-human transmission spread the 2019-nCoV and that 2019-nCoV infected people in a similar fashion to the SARS virus, despite there being a significant divergence in gene sequences.