2019_nCoV/SARS-CoV-2: rapid classification of betacoronaviruses and identification of Traditional Chinese Medicine as potential origin of zoonotic coronaviruses

Wassenaar, T.M.; Zou, Y.

Some coronaviruses are strictly host-specific, while others can be found in a range of hosts (Drexler et al. 2014) . The genome sequences of 2019_nCoV that is responsible for the current outbreak suggest that it too may have originated from bats, though it may have undergone a host jump to another mammal that was sold on a liveanimal market in Wuhan, where the outbreak presumably had started (Zhang et al. 2020) . While this manuscript was under review, it was published that this animal might have been a pangolin (Manis javanica; Liu et al. 2019) . Alternatively, though less likely, a highly infectious patient zero may have been present at the market, as we now know that the virus can spread via human-to-human contacts (Riou and Althaus 2020) and individuals infected with a coronavirus can be 'super-spreaders', as was demonstrated for MERS (Cho et al. 2016; Kang et al. 2017) .