Dr. Anthony R. Fehr, Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease at the
University of Kansas. He was one of about a hundred people in the
country studying the coronavirus full-time.
In the
fall, before this all happened, he says. “I knew that there’s a lot of
SARS-like viruses in China that this could happen. So I actually had a slide in
my lecture that was like, ‘there are lots of SARS-like coronaviruses, we could
have another outbreak within our lifetime.'”
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It’s
clearly descended from a bat population ,and what we do know is that there are a
lot of coronaviruses in bats and a lot of SARS-like coronaviruses similar to
this one and the original SARS. There’s a lot of viruses in bats in China.
China has a lot of really amazing caves that are very important dwelling places
for bats. Having said that, there are clearly coronaviruses in African bats, I
think I saw a report where there was an Australian one. So it’s not totally
just China, but there are a lot of bats with coronaviruses there.
Something
a lot of people don’t know that there was a big outbreak of a coronavirus just
two years ago in China, in pigs. There was a pig virus that emerged from bats.
Bats actually infected
pigs and that moved into the pig population in China. Just two years ago.
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There are
a lot of different viruses that cause the common cold. Coronaviruses account
for about ten to twenty percent of the common cold cases each year. And there
are four different coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. So you’ve
likely been infected with a coronavirus before,that is true.
The
difference between our cold viruses and then viruses like the flu and then this
SARS coronavirus 2 ,and SARS originally ,is that the cold viruses generally get
into our upper respiratory tract and that’s about as far as they go. They don’t
really go any further, they kind of get in there, and cause you to cough a
little bit, to sneeze, maybe give you a headache or those kinds of things. But
what’s different about these viruses, they can go into the lower respiratory
tract, and when they get in there and start replicating really aggressively,
that can really affect your ability to breathe.
Don't worry, A lot of
people are going to be asymptomatic, or have mild symptoms. And for those
people what’s probably happening is that they’re basically controlling the
virus before it gets into the lower respiratory tract.
The antibodies directed against the cold viruses will
not be able to do anything against this virus.Most
healthy individuals have what’s called an innate immune response, which is
where you don’t necessarily need to have previously seen this.
We all have pretty strong defenses ,our cells have a
lot of you know, just regular defenses that they can have all viruses. And in
younger, healthy people, those defenses oftentimes are good enough to stop the
virus before it gets going. Or at least delay it long enough before we can
develop our own antibodies against this virus.
I’m
hopeful that perhaps this will kind of diminish with the season as the other
coronaviruses do. I would not guarantee that ,that’s certainly not something
that’s guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m hopeful that will
be the case and that we’ll have time to maybe get a vaccine out by the time we
hit cold season next year.
