SARS CoV2: A Third Coronavirus Takes to the Air

Over the past two decades novel coronaviruses have spilled from the bat to the human population on three occasions. The first two breakouts in south China in 2003 and in Saudi Arabia in 2012 launched the SARS and MERS outbreaks, respectively. Both outbreaks were contained by aggressive case finding, contact tracing and quarantine activities. A third crossover of a novel coronavirus into the human population occurred in the fall of 2019. This event which is believed to have occurred around a wet market in Wuhan, China was unfortunately not efficiently contained and spread rapidly across China. Since its crossover events six months ago, the virus has infected over 4 million people and resulted in 300,000 deaths. Although progress is being made on both the drug and vaccine fronts, the main tool with which the human population has been seeking to contain the virus, social isolation, has been only partially effective and has resulted in major economic damage to the global economy. This presentation will focus on the biology, pathogenesis and epidemiology of the SARS-2 coronavirus and containment efforts to date.