NYTimes | Despite the new virus’s name, though, and
as the people who christened it well know, nCoV-2019 isn’t as novel as
you might think.
Something very much
like it was found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, a province
roughly a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, by a team of perspicacious
researchers, who noted its existence with concern. The fast spread of
nCoV-2019 — more than 4,500 confirmed cases,
including at least 106 deaths, as of Tuesday morning, and the figures
will have risen by the time you read this — is startling but not
unforeseeable. That the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a
bat, and possibly after passing through another creature, may seem
spooky, yet it is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study these
things.
One such scientist is Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a senior author of the draft paper
(not yet peer reviewed and so far available only in preprint) that gave
nCoV-2019 its identity and name. It was Ms. Shi and her collaborators
who, back in 2005, showed that
the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people.
Ms. Shi and colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since
then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human
pandemics.
In a 2017 paper, they set out how, after nearly five years of collecting fecal samples from bats in the Yunnan cave, they had found coronaviruses in multiple individuals of four different species of bats, including one called the intermediate horseshoe bat,
because of the half-oval flap of skin protruding like a saucer around
its nostrils. The genome of that virus, Ms. Shi and her colleagues have
now announced, is 96 percent identical to the Wuhan virus that has
recently been found in humans. And those two constitute a pair distinct
from all other known coronaviruses, including the one that causes SARS.
In this sense, nCoV-2019 is novel — and possibly even more dangerous to
humans than the other coronaviruses.
