Global patterns in coronavirus diversity

Anthony, Simon J.; Johnson, Christine K.; Greig, Denise J.; Kramer, Sarah; Che, Xiaoyu; Wells, Heather; Hicks, Allison L.; Joly, Damien O.; Wolfe, Nathan D.; Daszak, Peter; Karesh, William; Lipkin, W. I.; Morse, Stephen S.; Mazet, Jonna A. K.; Goldstein, Tracey

In 2002/3, SARS-Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) emerged in the Guangdong province of southern China (Drosten et al. 2003; Ksiazek et al. 2003) . It quickly spread to twenty-seven countries, infecting 8,098 people with 774 deaths, and was declared the first global pandemic of the 21st century. Bats were identified as the reservoir (Lau et al. 2005; Li et al. 2005 ) and probable source (Ge et al. 2013 ) of the outbreak. In 2012, the SARS pandemic was followed by MERS-Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which emerged in the Middle East (Zaki et al. 2012 ) with 1,782 confirmed human cases and 640 deaths (as of September 2016). Camels were identified as the likely source of human infections (Reusken et al. 2013; Azhar et al. 2014) ; however, bats were again found to host closely related (MERS-like) viruses and are therefore assumed to be the original evolutionary source (Woo et al. 2006; Anthony et al. 2012; Corman et al. 2014a,b; Wacharapluesadee et al. 2015; Anthony et al. 2017) .