A Brief Overview of SARS-CoV-2 (original) (raw)

2020, Archives of Clinical Microbiology

In December 2019, a novel coronavirus was identified in the city of Wuhan, since then more than 6,267,488 laboratory confirmed cases have been reported as of June 1st, 2020 and on March 11th WHO declared it a global pandemic. The highest numbers of fatalities are so far reported from USA (n=106,195), followed by UK (n=38,489), Italy (n=33,415) and Brazil (n=29,341). Scanning electron microscopy revealed spherical virus with a diameter of 120 nm-160nm. Its genome consists of a positive sense single stranded RNA (ssRNA+) of 26-32 kilo base pairs in length. Recent genome sequencing elucidated remarkable genetic similarity with bat-SLCoVZXC21, bat-SL-CoVZC45 virus strains and the sequenced strains showed 99.9% genetic homology with each other. The S2 protein of this novel virus has 93% similarity with bat-SL-CoVZXC21, bat-SL-CoVZC45 strains. The RNA was detected in the blood and stool samples. The most frequent manifestation of the infection is cough, fever, anosmia, pneumonia character...