제 5 호 Corona, Who Are You? A to Z
Kicker: SCIENCE (DISEASE)
Corona, Who Are You? A to Z
Scientific Approach to Coronavirus
by Ju-eun Yeon/Editor, Cha-eun Song /Reporter
{yeonje1113, thdcogml}@naver.com
In 2020, the corona virus has occurred. The official name is corona19 (COVID-19), a highly contagious new virus that started in Wuhan, China and spread around the world. The new virus has led to a shortage of masks or restraint from using dense facilities. In this article, we will introduce the causes of corona19 in relation to scientific facts, the process of dissemination, and the current state of vaccine development.
The Cause of COVID-19 and the Differences with Other Coronaviruses
▲ The image of Covid-19
The beginning of COVID-19 was that the people who visited a fish market of Wuhan, Hubei Province got sick. The patients all showed pneumonia symptom like consolidation, but the exact cause was unknown. Therefore, scientists began to work on what caused the new virus. The Chinese Medical Journal said on February 11 that this virus which has plunged the world into chaos is an unprecedented new virus and is closely related to the SARS coronavirus originating from bats. The researchers determined the cause of the virus through five infected people who worked in the fish market of Wuhan. The study identified the virus through a sequence analysis using *NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) technology and found that most virus readings were the coronavirus line. The researchers then collected reading belonging to the coronavirus and made the entire base sequence of new virus which resulted in a similar 99.8 to 99.9% of all patients’ samples. It also compared base sequence with other viruses. The result showed that the base sequence of the new virus was coincident with SARS (79%) and MERS (51.8%) and showed 87.6 to 87.7% similarity with other coronaviruses (ZC4, ZXC21) which originated from Chinese bats. Therefore, the five samples obtained showed the closest evolutionary lineage to the bats, but considering the similarity is less than 90%; the researchers view them as the newly developed corona virus. Therefore, the new virus is called COVID-19 (COrona VIrus Disease-19). Dr. Wang who conducted this study said, “Every coronavirus infected by animals, and several virus infections including SARS and MERS were caused by bats. However, the exact origin of the new infection is not known until now.” The paper uploaded bioRxiv that is the platform bio-science paper gave a boost to this argument. The researchers analyzed samples of 227 bats collected by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xishambana Tropical Botanical Gardens, in Yunnan Province, in the southwestern part of the country from May to October last year. As a result, the coronavirus, RmYN02, from bats has confirmed that HCoV-19 which caused COVID-19 are in the same homology as 93%.
*NGS Technology: post-Sanger sequencing methods with high- throughput sequencing technologies
Name | The year of occurrence | Place of occurrence | Propagation path |
SARS | 2002 | China | bat→musk cat→human |
MERS | 2012 | Middle East | bat→camel→human |
COVID-19 | 2019 | China | Unknown |
▲ Comparison of the coronaviruses
How to Prevent This Disease
Are we dealing with corona well? Although the initial response was well handled, including a clear understanding of the movements of the confirmed patients, the large number of secondary infections from the pseudo-religion of Sincheonji has become a major problem. In this situation, the most important thing is to prevent this disease. Thinking like “I think it’s not my business.” is very dangerous. Protecting our bodies is our own business. What are the means of prevention? It is the way that you maybe already know.
First, wash your hands thoroughly and often in water for more than 30 seconds using soap! It is important to make regular hand washing a living.
Second, wearing a mask is also important. Do not go out without a mask just because you feel stuffy! The simple thing is the best way.
Vaccine Development Status
How about a vaccine? According to the WSJ, U.S. pharmaceutical company Moderna has developed a vaccine that can contain the new corona and it is set to undergo clinical tests. Moderna is expected to begin clinical tests of the vaccine in late April on some 20 people. The drug industry, however, predicts that the clinical test is just an initial safety test and the real test will not be possible until late summer. In addition, major infectious disease experts say that reliable vaccines to be mass-produced and distributed to the world will not be available until at least 2021.
What about MERS in the past? MERS virus is a same variant virus as corona. Considering that there is no cure for corona, the drug industry says that if Jinwon Life Sciences succeeds in developing a MERS vaccine, it will work for corona too. According to the pharmaceutical industry, Jinwon Life Sciences has been developing the MERS vaccine GLS-5300 (INO-4700) since 2015. The total development cost was about 3.5 billion won. However, it is known that it will take about 10 years to commercialize the MERS vaccine because it is still in the phase of clinical trials.
As shown above, corona makes the world be in a state of emergency! Both for our health and economically, it poses great difficulties and fears. When looking at the situation that everyone wears a mask and people are afraid of cold symptoms, we can realize how grateful we should be for our normal daily lives. I hope all the students, all the people, and the global family can overcome this crisis together.
Sources:
https://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2020031017522864787
https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20200309092200083?input=1195m
https://www.editage.co.kr/insights/the-unusual-suspect%E2%80%94novel-coronavirus-identified?access-denied-content=metered&InsightsReferer=https://www.editage.co.kr/insights/the-unusual-suspect%E2%80%94novel-coronavirus-identified?regid=1584703222
Identification of a novel coronavirus causing severe pneumonia in human: a descriptive study, Chines Medical Journal, 2020
Next Generation Sequencing(NGS), A Key Tool to open the Personalized Medicine Era, Kwon Sun-il, 2012
https://biz.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2020/02/26/2020022602295.html
