Forty years with coronaviruses

Weiss, Susan R.

The coronavirus outbreaks had significant impacts on the previously small and cohesive coronavirus field. The discovery that a coronavirus is the etiologic agent of the SARS epidemic shocked coronavirologists, and we all began to work on the new SARS-CoV using all we had learned previously. As is now well known, but was not clear at the time, SARS disappeared after ∼6 or 7 mo with 8,069 infections and 774 deaths. As the virus disappeared, the number of people working on coronaviruses diminished. Following the SARS epidemic, two other human coronaviruses were identified, NL63 (croup, bronchiolitis; Pyrc et al., 2004 ) and HKU1 (pneumonia; Lau et al., 2006) . Another notable finding was the discovery that bats were the hosts for many SARS-like coronaviruses (Li et al., 2005; Lau et al., 2005) . When the more deadly MERS-CoV emerged in 2012, this rekindled the widespread interest in coronaviruses. However, there were important differences in the emergence of MERS-CoV, as it was found to have a reservoir in the intermediate animal, the camel, and continues to this day to spread from camel to human. Maybe this should have warned us that coronaviruses may emerge in different ways and spread with different patterns, as we have observed from SARS-CoV-2.