CORONAVIRUS - 2020

[XenaLives]

When the U.S. biological warfare program ended in 1969 it had developed six mass-produced, battle-ready biological weapons in the form of agents that cause anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q-fever, VEE, and botulism.[13] In addition staphylococcal enterotoxin B was produced as an incapacitating agent.[13] In addition to the agents that were ready to be used, the U.S. program conducted research into the weaponization of more than 20 other agents. They included: smallpox, EEE and WEE, AHF, Hantavirus, BHF, Lassa fever, Coronavirus,[36] melioidosis,[36] plague, yellow fever, psittacosis, typhus, dengue fever, Rift Valley fever (RVF), CHIKV, late blight of potato, rinderpest, Newcastle disease, bird flu, and the toxin ricin.[37]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapons_program

Discovery
Coronaviruses were first discovered in the 1930s when an acute respiratory infection of domesticated chickens was shown to be caused by infectious bronchitis virus (IBV).[9] Arthur Schalk and M.C. Hawn described in 1931 a new respiratory infection of chickens in North Dakota. The infection of new-born chicks was characterized by gasping and listlessness. The mortality rate of the chicks was 40–90%.[10] Fred Beaudette and Charles Hudson six years later successfully isolated and cultivated the infectious bronchitis virus which caused the disease.[11] In the 1940s, two more animal coronaviruses, mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) and transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV), were isolated.[12] It was not realized at the time that these three different viruses were related.[13]

Human coronaviruses were discovered in the 1960s.[14][15] They were isolated using two different methods in the United Kingdom and the United States.[16] E.C. Kendall, David Tyrrell and Malcom Byone working at the Common Cold Unit of the British Medical Research Council in 1960 isolated from a boy a novel common cold virus B814.[17][18][19] The virus was not able to be cultivated using standards techniques which had successfully cultivated rhinoviruses, adenoviruses and other known common cold viruses. In 1965, Tyrrell and Byone successfully cultivated the novel virus by serial passaging it through organ culture of human embryonic trachea.[20] The isolated virus when intranasally inoculated into volunteers caused a cold and was inactivated by ether which indicated it had a lipid envelope.[17][21] Around the same time, Dorothy Hamre and John Procknow at the University of Chicago isolated a novel cold virus 229E from medical students, which they grew in kidney tissue culture. The novel virus 229E, like the virus strain B814, when inoculated into volunteers caused a cold and was inactivated by ether.[22]

The two novel strains B814 and 229E were subsequently imaged by electron microscopy in 1967 by Scottish virologist June Almeida at St. Thomas Hospital in London.[23][24] Almeida through electron microscopy was able to show that B814 and 229E were morphologically related by their distinctive club-like spikes. Not only were they related with each other, but they were morphologically related to infectious bronchitis virus (IBV).[25] A research group at the National Institute of Health the same year was able to isolate another member of this new group of viruses using organ culture and named the virus strain OC43 (OC for organ culture).[26] Like B814, 229E, and IBV, the novel cold virus OC43 had distinctive club-like spikes when observed with the electron microscope.[27][28]

The IBV-like novel cold viruses were soon shown to be also morphologically related to the mouse hepatitis virus.[12] This new group of IBV-like viruses came to be known as coronaviruses after their distinctive morphological appearance.[8] Human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43 continued to be studied in subsequent decades.[29][30] The coronavirus strain B814 was lost. It is not known which present human coronavirus it was.[31] Other human coronaviruses have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 in 2019.[32][33] There have also been a large number of animal coronaviruses identified since the 1960s.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus

Many human coronavirus have their origin in bats.[54] The human coronavirus NL63 shared a common ancestor with a bat coronavirus (ARCoV.2) between 1190–1449 CE.[55] The human coronavirus 229E shared a common ancestor with bat coronavirus (GhanaGrp1 Bt CoV) between 1686–1800 CE.[56] More recently, alpaca coronavirus and human coronavirus 229E diverged sometime before 1960.[57] MERS-CoV emerged in humans from bats through the intermediate host of camels.[58] MERS-CoV, although related to several bat coronavirus species, appears to have diverged from these several centuries ago.[59] The most closely related bat coronavirus and SARS-CoV diverged in 1986.[60] A possible path of evolution, of SARS coronavirus and keen bat coronaviruses, suggests that SARS related coronaviruses coevolved in bats for a long time. The ancestors of SARS-CoV first infected leaf-nose bats of the genus Hipposideridae; subsequently, they spread to horseshoe bats in the species Rhinolophidae, and then to civets, and finally to humans.[61][62]

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Main article: Coronavirus disease 2019
In December 2019, a pneumonia outbreak was reported in Wuhan, China.[97] On 31 December 2019, the outbreak was traced to a novel strain of coronavirus,[98] which was given the interim name 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization (WHO),[99][100][101] later renamed SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. Some researchers have suggested the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market may not be the original source of viral transmission to humans.[102][103]

As of 23 April 2020, there have been at least 183,027[83] confirmed deaths and more than 2,623,415[83] confirmed cases in the coronavirus pneumonia pandemic. The Wuhan strain has been identified as a new strain of Betacoronavirus from group 2B with approximately 70% genetic similarity to the SARS-CoV.[104] The virus has a 96% similarity to a bat coronavirus, so it is widely suspected to originate from bats as well.[102][105] The pandemic has resulted in travel restrictions and nationwide lockdowns in several countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus