Dear Anita

Thank you for wishing me well, hope you are having a good week so far. I spent yesterday doing some spring cleaning around the house. I have been following updates on the coronavirus and it is very fascinating. I am also learning Italian and French from friends and I find it lots of fun. Here are some interesting things that I have found about the coronavirus:

Chinese scientists in Wuhan tested the samples of nine patients affected by the current coronavirus and they found that in these nine patients the coronavirus genomes were similar to a coronavirus that was originally found in bats making them think that the current coronavirus may have come from bats and this was confirmed by researchers in England and France (Genomics Education Programme from England article). The SARS-COV-1 (sars disease) in 2003-2004, which shares 79.5 % of its genome with the current coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) was discovered by scientists to have come from bats, so currently scientists believe that the current coronavirus that is spreading likely originated from a mutation in a coronavirus that was originally from the bat population and spread to humans. Scientists also think that once the current coronavirus spread to humans, there was no other intermediate species that facilitated the spread, but that the current coronavirus became widespread due to human to human contact. According to CNN, the reason why humans are coming into contact with bats and getting the current coronavirus and spreading it to others via human interactions is that people are cutting down trees for homes in forests where bats live and that is making the bat population come into closer contact with people.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the current coronavirus is not airborne because the droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes are too heavy to remain in the air and they fall onto surfaces where if a person touches the surface and then touches their face with their hands there is a chance for the coronavirus to enter the body.

Why the current coronavirus is not genetically made in a laboratory:

Scientists discovered that the coronavirus spike protein on the virus’s outer membrane was so effective at binding to the ACE2 receptors on the human respiratory cells that scientists think that the virus likely resulted as a product of natural evolution rather genetic engineering.

The evidence for natural evolution is further supported by the coronavirus’s molecular structure because scientists discovered that the coronavirus structure resembled that of the coronavirus that originally affected bats and differed from the known coronaviruses. The current coronavirus is an RNA virus and RNA viruses can mutate, if it was manufactured in a laboratory it would not be able to mutate itself, the fact that it can mutate its genome points that natural evolution may be at play to select for traits that help the virus spread. In addition, the coronavirus shares similarities to the sars virus that originated from bats which makes scientists think that the coronavirus may have came from bats and then spread to humans. (ScienceDaily article).