Q&A on the Coronavirus Pandemic
Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of a Q&A we published Jan. 30. Much has changed since then.
An outbreak of viral pneumonia that began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019 has sickened more than 200,000 people and led to more than 8,000 deaths worldwide, as of March 18. (See the latest figures here.)
Scientists have made rapid progress in understanding the culprit, a new virus in the coronavirus family, which has been named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2. The pneumonia-like disease it causes is called COVID-19.
As the virus has spread, however, misinformation has, too. We’ve written about many bogus claims about the new coronavirus spread through social media, as well as false and misleading claims made by politicians. See our Coronavirus Coverage page for a guide to our articles.
Here, we answer some key questions about what is known so far about the outbreak and the virus.
When did the outbreak begin, and what is the cause?
Scientists are still working to determine when the virus first emerged in people, but the earliest known instances of the disease occurred in early December in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in central China.
After a string of mysterious pneumonia cases, many of them linked to a seafood market selling wild game and live animals, officials reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization on Dec. 31.
By Jan. 7, Chinese authorities had isolated a virus, later named SARS-CoV-2, as the cause of the disease, and shared the genome a few days later. This allowed other countries to test for the virus, and for scientists to begin devising treatments and investigating how the outbreak began.
Coronaviruses are a diverse family of large RNA viruses that have characteristic spikes on their surface, making them look like they have a halo, or corona, when viewed under a microscope.
Most coronaviruses that infect humans are relatively benign and cause mild respiratory diseases such as the common cold, said Susan Weiss, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, in a phone interview.
But in recent years, new coronaviruses have cropped up that are far more dangerous to humans, including the, virus, which led to a global outbreak in 2003, and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or
