It is called novel-coronavirus for a reason. It is a new virus, discovered around 3 to 4 months back and now has put almost one-third of the world under lockdown. For many, no other incident in their lifetime had the ability to impact their lives like the current pandemic. There are many confusions and questions about the COVID-19 disease that people aren’t able to decide due to multiple sources of information sometimes contradicting each other.

It is our attempt to answer most of them based on the most reliable healthcare and scientific sources from the world. There are many aspects of the pandemic that is discovered on a regular basis and it’s important that any information that you seek is up-to-date. We assure you the article is updated with the most updated information on the ongoing pandemic.

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What is SARS-CoV-2? What is COVID-19? What is a novel coronavirus? what is a coronavirus?

One of the most confusing aspects of the current pandemic is about multiple names for the virus and disease you hear and read. To simplify let’s start from the basics. Coronaviruses are not new, human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. It gets its name due to the appearance of virions (the infective form of the virus) by electron microscopy, which has a fringe of large spike surface projections that match the crown or of a solar corona.

There were six other coronaviruses known to cause disease in human including your well-known common cold. Novel coronavirus was the name given to the new seventh one that originated in Wuhan in China in 2019. It was later named as 2019-nCoV and then finally as SARS-CoV-2. The name COVID-19 is for the disease caused by SARS-CoV2. After all, you need some time to name a newborn.

Just in case you are wondering SARS stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Did coronavirus (COVID-19) escape from a lab? Is it a biological weapon?

Did coronavirus (COVID-19) escape from a lab? Is it a biological weapon

As much as this theory is propagated by many trying to attribute the current pandemic to something man-made, this hypothesis is proven to be wrong.

A new analysis of SARS-CoV-2 has finally put that idea to bed. A group of researchers compared the genome of this novel coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans: SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2, which can cause severe disease; along with HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E, which typically cause just mild symptoms, the researchers wrote March 17 in the journal Nature Medicine.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” they wrote in the journal article.

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